Last updated 18 September 2026
Near Miss shows you the times you and your friends were in the same place, sometimes years before you met. To do that it needs to know where you have been. This page explains exactly what leaves your phone, what does not, and how to get rid of it.
The short version. Your photos and videos never leave your phone. Near Miss reads the date, time and coordinates recorded inside them and sends only those. Anything from the last two days is ignored. Places you mark as hidden are deleted before they are stored. Only people you have added as friends can see a near miss involving you. Nothing is sold, and there are no ads or third-party trackers.
Near Miss is an independent app made by Jeff Ponchick. For anything on this page, write to hello@nearmiss.io and a person will answer.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address | To sign you in, and so friends who already have your address in their contacts can find you. If you sign in with Apple and use Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address. |
| Name, username, profile photo | So friends recognise you. All optional except the username. |
| Photo and video metadata | The date, time and GPS coordinates stored inside each photo or video, plus its identifier on your device so the same one isn't counted twice. This is what near misses are found from. |
| Hidden places | The centre point and radius of any place you mark hidden, so we can throw away everything recorded inside it. |
| Contact fingerprints | A one-way SHA-256 hash of each email address in your contacts, to tell you which of them already use Near Miss. |
| Your near misses | The matched results, any comments you write on them, and whether you marked one "we were together" or "not interesting". |
| Device location | Read once, only in the moment you tap "I'm here now" while marking a hidden place. Near Miss does not track your location in the background and asks for no such permission. |
We use a small number of services to run the app. They process data on our instructions and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes.
We do not sell your data, share it with data brokers, or hand it to advertisers. We would disclose data if legally compelled to, and will tell you if we are allowed to.
Photo metadata and near misses are kept while your account exists, because that is the product. Everything else is deleted with your account.
Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will do it. If you are in the UK, EU or EEA, our legal basis is your consent for reading photo metadata and contacts (which you can withdraw at any time in your phone's settings), and legitimate interest for keeping the service running and secure. If you are in California, we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right.
Near Miss is not for people under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.
Everything travels over HTTPS and is stored encrypted at rest. Access to other people's rows is blocked at the database level, not just in the app, so a bug in the app cannot expose someone else's history. We are a small project, though, and no system is perfect. If you find a problem, please tell us at hello@nearmiss.io before telling anyone else.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.