Privacy Policy

The short version

There's no account and no sign in. The app collects no personal information and has no analytics, tracking or ads of any kind. It has no backend of its own: the little it sends goes to the services below, only to answer the question on screen.

Everything you set is stored on your own device and stays there.

The website has one thing the app doesn't: a form on the support page for telling me something. What you type into it is kept, because otherwise I could not read it. That form is the only part of any of this that stores anything about anybody, and it's covered in full below.

What's stored on your device

The app keeps this on the device it's running on. None of it gets sent anywhere.

• Your clean date, and whether specialty keytags are shown.
• The meetings you save, and which one you've marked as your home group.
• Which saved meetings have a reminder switched on, and how long before the start you want telling.
• Your preferences: language, miles or kilometres, 12 or 24 hour clock, theme, in person or online, and your filter choices.
• Your last known location and its address, so the app doesn't have to get a fresh fix every time you open it.
• Your last set of results, so there's still something to show when you have no signal.

Your clean date is written down twice: once with everything above, and once in the app's own storage, which a phone doesn't clear when it's short of space. It's the one thing here you can't simply enter again, and there's no server holding a copy. Both copies sit on your device and neither is sent anywhere.

Deleting the app removes all of it, both copies included. In a browser, clearing site data does the same. There's no backup anywhere, so it can't be recovered either.

What leaves your device

The app talks to two outside services, and only while you're on the screen that needs them.

The BMLT aggregator (bmltenabled.org)

To find what's near you, the app sends your approximate coordinates to the BMLT aggregator and gets back the nearest meetings. Requests identify the app, so BMLT admins can see which clients are using their servers. Nothing in them identifies you.

The aggregator is part of the BMLT open source project rather than part of this app, and the meeting data in it is published by NA service bodies around the world, each maintaining its own listings.

Worth stating plainly, since it would be easy to leave out: I help run the aggregator as a BMLT contributor, on infrastructure I pay for. That is a separate role from this app. The app gets no special treatment and no private access, it calls the same public API any other BMLT client calls.

Maps and place search

The map, searching for a place, and turning your coordinates into a place name all use a maps provider. Which one depends on where you use the app:

• iPhone and iPad: Apple Maps, built into the phone.
• This website: Apple Maps too, through Apple's MapKit JS.
• Android: Google Maps and Google Places.

Whichever it is, the map loads its tiles from that provider, searching for a place sends what you type to it for suggestions, and turning your coordinates into a place name sends those coordinates to it.

Their own privacy policies cover what they do with it: Apple's at apple.com/legal/privacy, Google's at policies.google.com/privacy.

Links you tap

Literature titles, daily readings, e-book retailers and directions links open na.org, your own service body's site where it publishes the reading in your language, a bookseller, or your maps app. A meeting's join link opens Zoom or whichever service the group uses. Once you're there, that site's privacy policy applies.

Sharing a meeting

The share button hands the meeting's details and a link to it to your phone's share sheet. Where it goes next is whatever app you pick, and the app isn't told which one you chose. A link someone sends you opens straight to that meeting if you have the app, and in a browser if you don't.

Location

Location permission is only used to ask what meetings are nearby, and only while you're using the app. You can say no. The app will ask you to search for a town instead, and everything else keeps working. Your location is never used for advertising, never linked to an identity, and this app keeps no copy of it beyond your own device.

Reminders

Your phone can tell you before a meeting you've saved starts. Those reminders are set on your phone, by your phone. There's no server and no push service anywhere in it, so nothing about which meetings you saved, or when you want telling, leaves the device.

Android asks separately for permission to post notifications, and again for permission to schedule an exact alarm. The second one matters: without it a reminder can arrive well after the meeting began, which is worse than not arriving. You can refuse or withdraw either in your phone's settings, and turn reminders off altogether in the app.

A reminder names the meeting, which means it appears on your lock screen. If that's more than you want on a screen other people can see, leave reminders off.

Your calendar

A meeting page can add the weekly meeting to your calendar. The app opens your phone's own event editor with the entry already filled in, and nothing is saved until you confirm it, so you see exactly what it says before it exists.

The app only ever writes. It never reads your calendar: on iPhone it asks for write only access, and on Android the permission that would let it read is stripped out of the app before it ships.

The entry carries the meeting's name and its address, and nothing else. No "NA", no "Narcotics Anonymous", no format names, and the notes are left empty. A calendar syncs to iCloud or Google, renders on a lock screen, and lands on whatever shared family or work calendar you happen to keep, and that isn't a disclosure this app should make on your behalf.

The feedback form

The support page has a form for reporting a bug, asking for something, or telling me the app got something wrong. Sending it stores what you typed in a database I run on Cloudflare, which only I read.

What's stored is the whole of it: your message, which of the four things you picked it was about, the email address if you chose to type one, and the date it arrived. Nothing else is recorded - not your IP address, not your browser or device, not where you are, and nothing tying one message to another or to anything you do in the app. Leave the email box empty and there is nothing on the message that says who sent it.

An address, if you give one, is used to reply about that message and nothing else. It goes on no mailing list, and it goes to no one else. Ask me to delete what you sent and it's deleted.

The form is checked for bots by Turnstile, which is Cloudflare's own and runs in your browser as you send. It sets no tracking cookie, follows you nowhere, and tells me only whether a submission looks automated. It's used here rather than one of the alternatives because Cloudflare already carries every request to this site, so it isn't a new company learning that you visited.

The form is on this website only. The app has no form in it and sends nothing here.

What's never collected

• No name, email, phone number or account. The one exception is an email you choose to type into the feedback form above, and only then.
• No advertising ID, device fingerprint or cross app tracking.
• No analytics, crash reporting or usage stats.
• No record of what meetings you looked at, saved, or set a reminder for, and none of your clean date.

Nothing is sold or shared, because nothing is collected to sell.

Anonymity

Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of the NA program. The app asks you nothing about yourself and has no way to know who you are.

Children

The app isn't directed at children and collects nothing from anyone. It's a public meeting directory, and anyone who needs a meeting can use it.

Changes

If this policy changes, so does the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about this policy or anything else: app@nameetingsnearme.app. There's more on the support page.

That address goes to a personal inbox. Emailing it is your choice, and whatever you write in it is seen by whoever reads it. The app never emails anyone for you.