Privacy notice
Effective 19 October 2026
Townbell is an invite-only alarm for residential estates: an approved resident presses and holds a button, and the phones of approved neighbours ring, showing the house number. This notice explains what Townbell collects, why, who can see it, how long it is kept and your rights. We collect only what the alarm needs. There are no ads, no analytics or tracking tools, and nothing is sold.
Who is responsible
Townbell is run by Maxim Yegorov, an individual in Ireland, who is the data controller. Contact: privacy@townbell.app.
What we collect
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Your Google (or Apple) account's email address and account ID | To sign you in. We do not see your password. |
| Your first name and house number | So neighbours know who raised an alert and where, and so an admin can check you live in the estate. |
| Your estate membership: role, status, when you asked to join and who approved you | To keep the estate invite-only. |
| Your phone's push token, platform, app version, whether the alarm permissions are on, and when the app last checked in | To ring your phone, and to warn you or your admin when it may not ring. |
| Alerts: who raised them (house number and name), when, and the reason chosen (for example "Suspicious car") | To ring neighbours and keep a short history of what happened. |
| Delivery results: whether each phone received and rang an alert | To show the sender "Rang N of M houses" and to find phones that miss alerts. |
| Your estate's WhatsApp group invite link, if an admin adds one | So members can open the group from the app. Shown only to approved members. |
| Your estate's emergency contacts, if an admin adds them: up to five names, phone numbers and short notes (for example the local Garda station, or a resident who agreed to be listed) | So members can call them with one tap. Shown only to approved members of that estate; the admin can change or remove them at any time. |
| Wrong invite codes entered | To stop people guessing codes. |
We do not collect your location, contacts, photos or phone number, and the app has no free-text field for describing people.
Our legal basis
We process this data to provide the service you sign up for (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)): without it, Townbell cannot ring your neighbours' phones or yours. Wrong-code records are kept on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping estates safe from outsiders (Article 6(1)(f)). Notifications are only shown if you allow them on your phone.
Who can see your data
- Approved members of your estate see your first name and house number, including on their phones when you raise an alert.
- Your estate's admins also see your membership status and your phone's status (app version, alarm permissions, last check-in), so they can help when a phone may not ring, and they see delivery results for alerts.
- Other estates see nothing about you.
- The operator can access the database to run and repair the service and to investigate reported misuse.
Service providers
These companies process data for us under their standard data processing terms:
| Provider | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database and sign-in | EU (Ireland) |
| Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google Sign-In) | Delivering alerts to phones; signing in with Google | Global, including the US |
| Apple (Push Notification service, Sign in with Apple) | Delivering alerts to iPhones; signing in with Apple | Global, including the US |
| GitHub | Storing daily database backups in a private repository | US |
| Cloudflare | Hosting this website and the invite links | Global |
Transfers outside the EU rely on the providers' Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
How long we keep it
- Alerts: 12 months.
- Delivery results and phone check-ins: 90 days.
- Wrong invite codes: 1 day.
- Accounts that are not approved in any estate: deleted after 30 days.
- When you delete your account or are removed from your estate, your data is deleted within 30 days. Alerts you raised keep only your house number.
- Backups: 30 days.
Your rights
You can ask to see, correct, export or delete your data, and object to or restrict its use, by emailing privacy@townbell.app. We reply within one month. You can also complain to Ireland's Data Protection Commission.
Deleting your account
In the app, open Settings and tap Delete my account: your account, membership and phone registration are deleted at once. You can also email privacy@townbell.app from the address you signed in with, and we will delete them within 30 days. Alerts you raised stay in your estate's history with only your house number.
Children
Townbell is for adult residents and is not intended for anyone under 16.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit. The database is in the EU; backups are kept by GitHub (above). Each estate's data is isolated from other estates by the database itself, and only approved members can raise alerts. If a breach puts your data at risk, we will tell the Data Protection Commission within 72 hours and tell you without undue delay.
Changes
If this notice changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect.