Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 15, 2026

BarCrawl ("we," "our," or "us") respects your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, when we share it, and the choices available to you. It covers the BarCrawl mobile app, our websites gobarcrawl.com and sales.gobarcrawl.com (including public bar pages), the bar-owner portal at portal.gobarcrawl.com, and the services behind them.

Information We Collect

Account Information — When you create an account, we collect your email address, display name, date of birth, password credentials for email sign-in, and account status information such as email verification. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive a provider identifier and, when provided by that service, your name and email address. You may also choose to upload a profile photo.

Location Information — BarCrawl accesses your approximate or precise device location while you use the app so we can show nearby bars and help you search different areas. We never store your raw coordinates — only a coarse, resolved area (such as your city or metro) — and only with your consent. You can manage location permissions at any time in your device settings, and turn the "Remember my area" consent on or off under Settings in the app — turning it off also deletes the stored area.

User Content — We store content you create in the app, including bar ratings, reviews, uploaded photos, direct messages, friend activity, and bar survey responses. Every photo you upload is re-encoded before it is stored, which strips the embedded metadata a camera writes into a file — including GPS coordinates, device identifiers, and capture time. Only the pixels survive.

Device Information — We collect device and push notification identifiers when needed to send account, friend, message, or bar-related notifications. Invalid tokens are removed automatically.

Usage Analytics — We record basic usage events from the app, the website, and the bar-owner portal: screen and page views, when a session starts and ends, sign-ups, sign-ins, account deletions, and a handful of security-relevant events. Each event stores the event type, which product it came from, the time it happened, a small amount of context, and your account identifier when you are signed in. We use this to understand what people use, to keep the service running, and to spot abuse. We do not use it to build advertising profiles, and we do not sell it.

Advertising Interactions — BarCrawl shows promoted content and ads from bars and other advertisers. Ads are targeted using your resolved area — never your precise location — and each campaign is limited to a set number of views per person per day. That cap and our measurement are per-person, so these records are not anonymous: an ad click is stored with your account identifier for up to 90 days, and your daily view count for a campaign is held in a short-lived counter that resets every day. Advertisers see totals for their campaigns only — never your identity, your profile, or your individual activity. We do not sell this data.

Install and Referral Attribution — BarCrawl uses Branch to make referral and invite links work, including after an install: tap a link, get the app from the App Store or Play Store, and the app opens already knowing which link you came from. The Branch SDK runs in the app from launch and sends device and install information to Branch so it can make that match. Branch handles this under its own privacy policy. We use it for referral attribution and deep links, and nothing else.

Error Diagnostics — When something goes wrong on our servers, we send the error report to Sentry, our error-monitoring provider. These reports are mostly technical — a stack trace, the request path, the server environment — but they can include identifiers attached to the failing request, such as an account identifier or an email address.

Website Sign-ups — If you enter your email address on gobarcrawl.com to hear about BarCrawl launches and news, we store that address until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove it (email support@gobarcrawl.com). It is used only for BarCrawl announcements and is never sold or shared.

No Third-Party Trackers — Apart from Branch (described above), which is used only for invite links and install attribution, the app carries no third-party analytics or advertising trackers. Our marketing websites, gobarcrawl.com and sales.gobarcrawl.com, count page visits on our own servers rather than sending them to anyone: which page was opened, the website it was opened from, and which link was followed away from the page. They set no cookies and store nothing at all on your device, so there is no identifier and those visits cannot be tied to you or to each other. If your browser or device sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is recorded. We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, or cross-site tracking of any kind.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

What Others Can See

Other users may see your display name, profile photo, ratings, reviews, and other content you choose to share in app features. Your email address and date of birth are not shown publicly. Direct messages are visible only to the participants in that conversation and to BarCrawl systems as needed to operate, secure, and support the service.

Bars You Contact — When you send a bar a message in the app, the owners of that bar see your display name and what you wrote, and can reply. When you answer a bar's survey, its owners see your answers. Your email address, date of birth, and account identifier are never shown to bar owners.

Public Bar Page Contact Form — If you use the contact form on a bar's public web page, we store the name, email address, and message you enter, and email them to that bar's owners with your address as the reply-to, so they can answer you directly. You do not need a BarCrawl account to use it.

Bar Owners — If you claim a bar, we store the contact name, phone number, and note you give us, how our staff verified that you run the bar, and the outcome of the review. BarCrawl staff may call the number you provide to confirm the claim.

Third-Party Services

BarCrawl uses the following services, each governed by its own privacy policy:

Stripe processes payments only for bars and businesses paying for a BarCrawl business tier — it does not handle any payment or billing information for individual app users. We do not sell your personal data to any third party.

Where Bar Information Comes From

Bar listings are assembled from several public sources, not from you. We use Google Maps and Google Places; OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License; and public government data, including US Census boundary files for the city and metro areas we use, state liquor-license registries, and municipal inspection records. Bar owners and app users can also add or correct venue details. Where a bar has no owner on BarCrawl, its listing may also show events published by public ticketing services such as Ticketmaster, always credited and linked to the source; those stop as soon as the bar is claimed or subscribes. None of these sources tell us anything about you personally.

Data Retention

We retain account information for as long as your account remains active or as needed to operate the service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Individual ad-click records are kept for up to 90 days and then folded into campaign totals. Per-person ad view counters expire about a day after they are written. You can delete your account at any time from Settings in the app, or by contacting support.

Data Security

Passwords and sensitive tokens are hashed or otherwise protected before storage. We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards, but no method of transmission or storage is completely secure.

Your Choices

You can update certain profile information inside the app, control location permissions in your device settings, turn the "Remember my area" consent on or off under Settings, delete your account from Settings, and contact support if you need help with your data.

Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, request a copy of it, request that we correct or delete it, and object to certain uses (including targeted advertising). We do not sell your personal information.

You can exercise these rights from the app: use Delete Account in Settings to delete your account and its data, or email support@gobarcrawl.com to request a copy of your data or ask us to correct it. We verify the request is coming from the account holder before acting on it, and we respond within 45 days of receiving a verified request. Copies of your data are provided as a structured, machine-readable JSON file covering your account and the records tied to it. We will not discriminate against you — for example, by degrading service or charging different prices — for exercising any of these rights.

Cookies

The BarCrawl mobile app does not use browser cookies. On gobarcrawl.com we set no cookies for analytics or advertising. The bar-owner portal and the staff dashboard set a session cookie only to keep you signed in.

Children’s Privacy

BarCrawl is intended only for users of legal drinking age, and every account records a date of birth at sign-up so we can enforce that. We do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. If you believe a minor has provided personal information, contact us so we can review and remove it where appropriate.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the effective date above. Continued use of BarCrawl after an updated policy is posted means you acknowledge the updated policy.

Contact Us

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at support@gobarcrawl.com.