Privacy
Tap Watch keeps as little about you as it can. There are no accounts, and it never asks for your name or email.
Your location
If you let Tap Watch use your location, distances are worked out on your phone. Your location is never sent to Tap Watch or stored.
If you type a postcode instead, it's sent to postcodes.io, a free public service, to find where it is. Tap Watch doesn't keep it.
Votes, beer submissions and photos
Tap Watch never stores your internet (IP) address. To stop people voting many times, it needs to tell one phone from another, so your browser keeps a random number of its own: made up the first time you visit, meaning nothing, tied to nobody. Each vote, photo or submission is stored with a scrambled code made from that number. The code can't be turned back into anything about you, the way it's made changes every 30 days, and codes are wiped after 30 days. If your browser won't save the number — private browsing, say — the code is made from your internet address and browser type instead, and the address still isn't stored.
While the code is kept, the person who runs Tap Watch can see when several votes, photos or submissions came from the same device, shown as a made-up name like "Amber Otter 17". This helps spot spam and thank regular helpers. It never shows who you are.
Photos of the taps:
- have hidden details such as location and phone model removed, on your phone and again on our server
- keep one thing only: the date the picture was taken, so an older photo dates the tap list correctly rather than looking like today's news
- are only seen by the person who checks them, and are never published
- are deleted once they've been checked, or after 30 days
Please don't include people in your photos. Any note you add is kept with the report.
Messages you send us
A message sent through Tell us is stored with the same scrambled code as everything else, so repeat messages can be spotted. Discarded messages are deleted outright; kept ones stay on a private page of ideas. Don't put anything private in a message: there's no reply address, so add your own if you want one.
On your device
Tap Watch saves three small things in your browser:
- which beers you've voted on in the last 24 hours, so the buttons show you've voted. Never sent anywhere
- your Light or Dark choice, if you've made one. Never sent anywhere
- the random number above. It goes with a vote, photo or submission, so the same device isn't counted twice, and is only ever stored as the scrambled code
There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and nothing follows you from site to site. Clearing this site's stored data clears all three.
Counting how the site is used
Tap Watch keeps a daily tally of how it is being used: how many times each page was opened, which beers were searched for, which pub lists were opened and how often the map was used. Searches that found nothing are kept as the words typed, so missing beers can be added to the list.
These are totals for a whole day and nothing else. There is no cookie, no identifier and no record of who did what, when, or in what order, so two visits can never be joined up — not even your own. The counting is done by Tap Watch itself: nothing is sent to Google, Meta or any analytics company, and the totals are deleted after two years.
Other services
- The site is hosted by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare handles your internet address to deliver pages. Tap Watch has Cloudflare's visit logging switched off.
- The map and its fonts come from Tap Watch itself, not from Google or other map companies.
- "Open in maps" opens Google Maps, which has its own privacy policy. Nothing is sent to Google unless you tap it.