PearCircle

PearCircle collects no personal data. Your location, your places and your trips live only on the devices in your circles. Nothing readable is ever sent to a server. No account required.

All data is stored locally on the devices in your circles only:

• Your profile name and optional avatar
• Your current and recent location updates
• Places (geofences) defined inside each circle
• Place transitions (arrived at, left) recorded as you cross a geofence
• Trips recorded by your device, if you choose to share them with a circle
• The circles you belong to and the cryptographic keys that identify the members to each other
• App preferences (theme, units, notification settings)

None of this data leaves your devices except to sync directly with other devices in your circles (see Peer Sync below).

When you share a circle with others, PearCircle syncs data directly between devices using the Hypercore Protocol, a peer-to-peer technology. There is no server storing your data and no account. On networks where a direct connection cannot be made, the connection can fall back to the PeerLoom relay described below, which forwards the encrypted traffic without being able to read it. Your location data is shared only with the specific devices you have invited into a circle.

All sync traffic is encrypted end-to-end and every location update, place change and trip is cryptographically signed by the writing device. No third party ever receives or has access to your location data.

Most of the time your devices connect to each other directly. On a small number of networks that direct connection cannot be made at all. In that case PearCircle can fall back to a relay that PeerLoom runs, which passes the encrypted traffic between the two devices.

The relay cannot read what passes through it. Your locations, places and trips stay encrypted end to end and PeerLoom holds no key to them. What a relay unavoidably handles is the fact that two devices are talking, identified by random public keys rather than names or email addresses, along with the timing and the amount of data. The relay keeps no record of it and stores nothing.

The relay is a last resort and never the first choice. The relay can be turned off, in which case PearCircle is purely device to device and will not connect on the rare networks where a direct connection is impossible. Full detail: The PeerLoom relay.

The map background comes from a public tile provider (currently OpenFreeMap). Your device asks the provider for tiles by coordinate only. No information about who you are, what circle you are looking at or whose pins are on the map is sent to the tile provider. Tiles you have already viewed are cached locally so the map keeps working offline.

• Location (foreground and background): Required to share your live location with your circles and to detect arrivals and departures at the places you have defined. Location data stays on your device except to sync directly with your circle members.
• Motion and physical activity: Used on-device to label your pin as walking, driving, flying or stationary and to record trips. Raw sensor readings never leave the device.
• Camera and photo library: Used to scan circle invite QR codes and to set a profile avatar. Photos are stored locally on your device.
• Notifications: Used to deliver local alerts such as arrivals at places and time-sensitive circle activity. Notification data never leaves the device.
• Network access: Used for peer-to-peer connections with devices in your circles, for the relay fallback described above and for fetching public map tiles. No readable location data is sent to any server.

PearCircle contains no analytics, no advertising SDKs, no crash reporting services and no third-party trackers of any kind.

PearCircle does not require you to create an account or provide an email address or phone number. Your identity within the app is a cryptographic key pair generated locally on your device.

PearCircle is designed for use by families and groups of trusted contacts. Location data about minors is stored locally on the paired devices in their circle and is never transmitted to PeerLoom, Google, Apple or any third party.

PearCircle is fully open source. You can inspect the complete source code at github.com/peerloomllc/pearcircle.

Questions about this privacy policy? Reach out at peerloomllc@proton.me.