Privacy

The short version

Lahore Streets is for finding places through the people you trust. We keep what it takes to do that: your account, the places you save and recommend, and who you follow. We never keep a record of where you are, and businesses see counts, not who you are.

Your account

To sign in you give us a name and an email address, and we store a hashed password — never the password itself. If you use a passkey or two-factor authentication we store what is needed to check it.

Your preferences

When you set up your profile you can tell us a few things to shape what we suggest. All of them are optional:

• Your home town — where discovery searches from.
• What you like to eat — such as street food, cafés and chai, or BBQ and desi.
• Other interests — the other kinds of place you enjoy, such as parks, markets or heritage.
• Access and facilities that matter to you — step-free entry, quiet spaces and the like. These are preferences about a visit. They are not a medical record and we do not treat them as one.

What you tell us by using the app

• Places you want to go, have been to, loved or recommended.
• Lists you make, and whether each one is public.
• People you follow, and who follows you.
• Reviews, photos and private notes to an owner.
• Stamp cards you collect at venues.

Recommendations, reviews, photos and public lists are shown under your display name, and your friends see what you recommend. Private lists are visible only to you. Unlisted lists are visible to anyone you send the link to, which is what "unlisted" means. A note to an owner goes to that business only and is never published.

Finding friends from your contacts

If you choose to look for friends in your phone's contacts, the app turns each email address into a one-way hash on your phone and sends only the hashes. We match them against people already on Lahore Streets and then drop them. Your address book itself never leaves your phone, and we do not contact anyone in it.

Stamp cards

A stamp card is private to you. When staff scan it, the venue sees your first name and initials and the stamps given at its own counter — nothing else about you.

Photos

Photos are stored with a storage provider, not in the page. We make smaller versions for display and we strip the embedded camera data — including any location the camera recorded — from what we keep. A photo can be hidden by moderation without removing the review it belongs to.

Where you are

You choose a home area, and that is what discovery searches from. If you use the "near me" option your device asks for permission first, and the coordinates are used to run that search — we do not keep them as a record of where you live.

If you allow location in the app, it can tell you when you're at a place you have saved or a popular one nearby, so you can recommend it or collect a stamp. Your position is used for that check and then discarded. We do not store where you are, and your friends never see your location.

Where distance appears in a business's figures it is a banded number — under five miles, five to ten, and so on — never a location.

What businesses can see

A venue that has claimed its listing sees how its listing is performing: how many people saw it, viewed it, saved it, tapped for directions, revealed an offer code. These are counts. A business is never shown who you are, what else you have saved, or where you live.

Revealing or copying a discount code is recorded as exactly that. We have no way of knowing whether a code was accepted at a till, so nothing we show a business claims that it was.

Measurement

We record events such as "this listing was shown in a search" or "this place page was viewed", so that businesses get honest figures and we can tell which parts of the site are worth keeping. These are aggregated into daily totals.

When something breaks

We use an error-monitoring service to be told when the site throws an error. It is configured not to send the contents of your requests, your address, or the values in database queries — what it sends is the error and where in our code it happened.

Cookies

There is no cookie banner on this site, because there is nothing to consent to. Nothing is set for advertising, for measurement, or for anybody else's benefit — and nothing at all is set by a third party. Two cookies are set when you arrive, and both are needed for the site to work:

• lahore-streets-session — your session. Without it a form cannot be submitted and you cannot stay signed in.
• XSRF-TOKEN — the security token that same form needs to be accepted. It is what stops another site submitting a form as you.

Two more are set only if you operate the control that sets them: appearance, when you choose light or dark mode, and sidebar_state, when you collapse the sidebar in the business dashboard. Neither is set by visiting.

Counting visits does not use a cookie. When you open a place page we record that it was opened, along with a code made from your network address and browser that changes every midnight and cannot be linked to the day before. It is not stored on your device, and there is nothing in it that identifies you.

Getting a copy, and deleting it

From your profile settings you can ask for a copy of everything we hold about you. We build it in the background and email you a link, which expires. You can also delete your account from the same page.

Deleting your account removes your profile, your preferences, your saved places and your lists. Reviews are handled under the terms: a business cannot delete a review about it, and neither the presence nor the absence of one should be something anybody can buy.

Business accounts

If you manage a listing, we also keep your business's name and contact details and the people who can manage it. These are used to contact you about claims and listings and are not shown to visitors.

Who this service is for

You must be 18 or over to make an account.

Asking us something

Email [email protected] with any question about this page, or to ask us to correct something we hold about you.