Keep your village safe

Reports are held in a UK-region database and the app is served from London. Your exact location is never stored — coordinates are moved by about a hundred metres before they are written down, so the pin lands on the right street and not on your door. Faces in a photograph are covered on your own phone before it is uploaded — a black box, or a mosaic and a blur, depending on what your village has chosen, and you can always ask for the black box — which also strips the GPS tag cameras write into every picture. Reports are archived after 12 months and photographs are deleted after 6.

Your neighbours see a rewritten version with names, registrations and house numbers taken out. Your village coordinator can see your original wording, and every time they do it is written to an audit trail with their name against it. Nobody outside your village reads the report itself — not another village, not us. There are two exceptions, and both apply only once a report is published. A coordinator can post an alert somewhere public — your village’s WhatsApp Channel, or Facebook; nothing is posted automatically, and a coordinator copies it and posts it themselves, as a headline, an area, a short extract and a link. And that link opens a preview page anyone can see, which carries the category, how serious it was, roughly when it happened, which village, and the first line of the same rewritten description your neighbours see — never the rest of it, never the location, never a photograph, and never your name.

When you submit a report, the text goes to Claude, which rewrites it without the identifying details, sorts it into a category and suggests how serious it is. You see the result and can edit it before anything is saved. If the AI is unavailable your report still files in your own words, and the screen says so. Reports wait for a coordinator to approve them unless your village has turned that review off, which is a setting its coordinators control and which the app tells you about before you file.

No, and most villages using this do not have one. A neighbourhood watch group, a residents’ association or a few neighbours who want to organise properly can run a village on their own — the coordinator becomes the data controller and accepts one agreement, written for a volunteer rather than a clerk, before the village takes its first report. Where a parish or town council has taken a village on, it is the controller instead and adopts the three documents a council is separately obliged to hold. Starting without a council does not shut the door on one: a village can be handed to a council later, and it keeps running while the council does its own paperwork.

Register as a resident, then apply from Settings. You are asked how you are involved in the village — Neighbourhood Watch, the parish council, something else — and why you want the access. A platform administrator reviews the application by hand and you hear back either way. It is not self-service on purpose: a coordinator can read the original wording of every report their village files, so somebody has to decide that rather than a form.

Free for one village, for residents and coordinators alike, with no card and no trial period. A paid tier for groups of parishes is planned and does not exist yet — nothing on this site can charge anybody anything today.