Porchlight
Porchlight privacy policy
Last updated 11 September 2026.
Porchlight is the opt-in map of which doors are giving out candy on Halloween, and what they are offering. This policy explains what is published, what is kept, and what is deliberately impossible here.
Adding your porch publishes where you live
This is the most important sentence on the page, so it is the first one. When you add your porch, the location of your door appears on a map that every other person using the app in your area can see, along with whatever you said you are offering and the hours you gave. That is the entire product and it is not a side effect.
It is the same signal a lit porch has sent to every stranger on the street for a century, with more detail and a stop time attached. But a lightbulb is not searchable and this is, so you should decide to publish deliberately rather than discover it afterwards.
Doing nothing publishes nothing. If you do not add your porch, there is no row for your house and no way for anyone else to create one. A household that wants to be left alone is not shown as declining or unavailable — it simply is not on the map, indistinguishable from a house nobody asked.
There is no way to mark a house as one to avoid
No part of this app lets anyone say anything about a house other than their own. There is no column that could hold it, no reporting reason that creates it and no screen that would show it. This is refused rather than postponed: an unverifiable public accusation attached to a private address is defamation with a map reference, and it would be unmoderatable on the single night it was used.
Your address is never stored, because it is never asked for
There is no address field in this app and no address column in its database. What is stored is a coordinate you placed yourself, plus a free-text landmark if you chose to write one — the sort of thing neighbours already say to each other, like “the blue one with the big oak.” You decide how specific that is, and you can leave it empty.
Your device location, and the one thing it is for
When you add or move your porch, the app records where your device was standing at that moment and refuses the pin if it is not within about sixty metres. That check is the only reason location permission is requested, and it exists to stop somebody pinning a neighbour's door — which is this product's worst possible failure, because it points children at a house whose household never agreed to open it.
Location is requested while you are using the app only. There is no background location, no tracking, and no history of anywhere you went. The coordinate is used at the moment you create the pin and to draw the map around you, and nothing keeps a trail.
The map does not exist in November
Every porch requires a stop time; there is no way to publish one without an end. Pins are deleted two days after their window closes, and community listings thirty days after theirs. Deleted, not hidden: a hidden row is still a record that a particular household expected children at a particular place on a particular night, kept indefinitely for a purpose nobody agreed to.
What is stored
- Your email address and a display name, if you set one.
- Your porch — its coordinate, your landmark text, which of the five offerings you ticked, an optional short note, and your hours. One household has one porch; adding it again edits the one you have.
- Where your device stood when you created or moved that pin.
- Community listings, for organisers who bought one.
- Reports, so moderation works.
What is not stored
No street address. No password, because there is not one — signing in is a code sent to your email. No phone number. No payment details of any kind: the app is free for households, permanently, and the only thing sold is a community listing bought by an organiser through a web page rather than inside the app.
Nothing here is sent to a language model, and there is no advertising SDK, no targeting, no auction and no impression tracking anywhere in this app. A paid listing is content the organiser wrote, shown to everyone in range, ordered by start time like everything else.
Reporting
Anyone can report a porch or a listing, and the first report hides it immediately, before anybody has judged whether the report was right. That trade is deliberate: a wrongly hidden porch means a household hands out less candy, and a wrongly visible one means strangers at somebody's door.
Reports are private to the person who filed them. Nobody can read anybody else's, so a report is never itself a public accusation.
Blocking
You can block whoever added a porch or a listing, which stops their pins appearing for you. It is a different thing from reporting and it is worth being exact about the difference. A report takes a pin off the map for everybody. A block takes it off your map and nobody else's.
We store one row when you block somebody: your account, their account, and the time. Only you can read it. The person you blocked is never told, the number of times anyone has been blocked is never counted or shown, and nothing at all about their pin changes for other families. You can undo a block at any time from the account screen, and closing either account deletes the row.
This is not a way to mark a house as one to avoid. There is no such feature here and there will not be one. Blocking publishes nothing about anybody; it only subtracts somebody from your own view.
Who else is involved
Supabase hosts the database and sends the sign in codes. That is the whole list. We do not sell anything to anyone.
Deleting it
Deleting your account removes your profile and your porch immediately, and the pin disappears from everyone's map. If you only want off the map, delete your porch and keep the account — you do not have to close it to stop being listed.
Contact
Porchlight is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.