What Porchlight is, in one paragraph
You say where you are going and when you should be there. If that deadline passes and you have not checked in, the people you named are told, then told again 4 minutes later, on a ladder that ends with the suggestion that they call 911. Nobody is watching a screen on your behalf. There is no monitoring centre and no staff on call, and there never has been: the alarm is raised by a deadline passing, and it goes to the people you chose.
I want to name a person
Open Your people and choose Invite with a link. Send the link the way you already talk to them. They open it in any browser, sign in or make an account, and say yes. Nothing has to be installed on their side.
A link works once, and stops working after 7 days if nobody has used it. Make another whenever you need one.
I'm running late and my watch is about to go off
Open the watch and add time. One tap adds fifteen, thirty or sixty minutes. If it has already gone overdue, the same tap pushes the deadline out from now and stops the escalation, so anyone who was already told simply sees it running again.
The one thing extending cannot do is run forever. No watch lasts more than 18 hours from when it started, however many times you extend it, because a watch that never ends is not a check-in.
I forgot to end a watch and my people were told
That is the system working rather than failing. End the watch, and tell them you are fine. A net that occasionally embarrasses you is worth more than one that stays quiet when it matters, so it is built to err in that direction on purpose.
One of my people says they were never told
Work through these in order.
- Did they accept? Open Your people. A person under Watching over you has accepted and is told if you go overdue. A person under Asked has not said yes, and is told nothing until they do. Send them a new link and ask them to say yes.
- Did they allow notifications? A person who declined the permission has no address for an alert to arrive at. On a phone this is in the system settings for the app; in a browser it is the site permission.
- Are they using a browser on an iPhone? Apple only allows web notifications for a site added to the Home Screen. Share, then Add to Home Screen, then allow notifications from the icon rather than from Safari.
- Has their phone been checked? On their side, Watching has a row called Check this phone, or Check this browser. It says whether notifications are allowed and whether that device is registered, and it can show a test notification. Nothing on that screen is sent to anybody else.
In some of its messages the app calls a person who accepted a Guardian, which is the app's word for one of the people you named.
Notifications are not arriving on my own phone
Two different things send you notifications, and they fail differently.
In the installed app, the reminder before your deadline is scheduled by your own phone. If you declined the notification permission when you started your first watch, nothing was scheduled. Allow notifications in your system settings and start a new watch: it is scheduled when the watch is. The browser version schedules no reminder, so set your own alarm for a minute or two before the deadline.
The alert that your watch went overdue comes from our server and goes to the people you named, not to you. It does not depend on your phone being awake, or charged, or on a network. That is the part of this a location-sharing app cannot do: a map needs your phone alive and reporting, and the moment it goes dark it shows a last dot and says nothing.
My phone died mid-watch, or had no signal
The watch still runs. The deadline lives on our server and is checked every minute whether or not your phone is reachable, so a dead battery does not quietly cancel the thing that was going to raise the alarm.
An I'm safe pressed with no connection is kept on the phone and sent when the connection returns. The screen says it has not gone yet. If the deadline passes first, your people are told you are overdue, and the record says when you pressed.
I want to remove a person, or stop watching over one
To remove somebody you named, open Your people and choose Remove beside their name. It asks once. After that they are not told about your watches.
To stop watching over somebody who named you, open Watching and choose Stop watching over, with their name, under that person. You will no longer be sent their alerts, and they can ask you again.
Either side can end it at any time, and neither needs the other to agree.
I want to delete my account
In the app, open Your people, choose Account at the bottom, then Delete your account. You will be shown what goes and asked to type DELETE. It removes your profile, every watch and event on it, the people you named and the people who named you, your notification addresses, and your sign-in itself. It is not a request that goes into a queue.
It refuses in one case, and the screen says so. It will not delete while a watch is open, because that would turn an alarm other people are waiting on into silence: end the watch first.
If you no longer have the app, Delete your account says how to do it from any browser, or by writing in. If you only ever joined the list on this website and never made an account, write to the address below and ask to be removed.
Somebody is using Porchlight against me
What a person writes in Porchlight reaches the people they named. If somebody is using it to frighten or pester you, stop watching over them as described above, and their alerts stop reaching you. Then write to the address below and say what happened. A person reads it. The terms of use say what is not allowed.
If you are being threatened, that is a 911 call, not a support email.
Something on a screen looked wrong
Send it. A screenshot, what you had just tapped, and roughly when it happened is enough, and it is worth more than a careful description: the most useful bug report this project has had was a screenshot of one red error message that should never have reached a person.
What Porchlight will not do
- It never calls the police for you. The last rung of the ladder puts that decision in front of the people who know you, with the record in hand. Porchlight itself contacts no emergency service, ever.
- It cannot start a watch on somebody else. Not as a favour, not with their permission, not by us on request. The function that opens a watch takes no argument for whose watch it is, so there is nothing to ask for.
- It cannot tell you where someone is. A watch reads no position. If you have lost contact with someone and are frightened, that is a 911 call, not a support email.
- It cannot edit the record. Not for you and not for anyone. Check-ins and escalations are append-only once written.
Writing in
support@porchlight.watch. Porchlight is a small independent project built in Kansas City, so a reply comes from a person and can take a few days. Include what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead.
For anything about what is collected or how to get rid of it, the privacy policy is the fuller answer.
And if you are in danger right now, call 911.