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Privacy

playdar is a map of places to play in New York City. Browsing, filtering, and adding equipment or a photo never ask who you are. An account exists for exactly two optional things — saving a playground and writing a review — and it has nothing to sell either way.

Your location

playdar uses your location to show playgrounds near you. It stays on your phone.

When you tap Near me, playdar explains what it is about to do and then asks your phone for permission. If you agree, your coordinates are used inside the app, on your device, to centre the map and sort the list by distance.

Your location is never sent to us, never sent to anyone else, and never written down. It is not saved between visits. Nothing in our analytics records where you are or where you went — there is no coordinate anywhere in what we receive, because none is ever transmitted.

You can decline, and the whole app still works: the map, the full list of 1,781 places, every filter and every detail page. Declining costs you the distance sort and the blue dot, nothing else. Adding equipment works too — see below.

Adding equipment

No public source lists what is actually in a playground, so parents can add it. When you tap Add equipment and answer, we receive:

• which playground you were looking at, and what you told us is there or not there
• a random identifier for your device — not for you. It is generated on your phone, is not linked to anything else, tells us nothing about who you are, and exists so we can rate-limit and spot someone submitting nonsense
• whether you were at the playground at the time, and if so how far from its centre in metres. A report from someone standing there is better evidence than one from memory, so it is worth recording

Your coordinates are still never sent. The comparison happens on your phone; what leaves it is a yes-or-no and, when yes, a single distance figure for that playground. There is no way to work backwards from it to where you are, and it is only ever recorded against a playground you chose to open.

You can contribute without sharing location at all — the flag is simply recorded as unverified. Nothing you submit appears in the app until we have reviewed it, and what is published is a count of how many people said yes or no, never an individual report.

Adding a photo

You can send in a photo of a playground. Because a playground is a place where other people’s children are, this is the most carefully handled thing in playdar, and it works differently from everything else here.

The check happens on your phone

When you choose a photo, playdar looks for faces in it on your own device, using a face-detection model downloaded as part of the app. The photo is not uploaded first and inspected afterwards. If the check finds a face, the photo is discarded in your browser and never sent anywhere — not to us, not to any other company, not to any “AI service”. No image you take is ever transmitted for screening.

That check is deliberately cautious and it is not clever. It will sometimes stop a photo that was perfectly fine — a face painted on a wall counts. It will also miss things: a child from behind, at a distance, or partly hidden. It is a first filter, not a guarantee, which is why a person reviews every photo afterwards.

What we remove before storing anything

A photo file from a phone normally carries hidden metadata: GPS coordinates of where it was taken, the date and time, the camera, the phone model, and sometimes a serial number. playdar removes all of it. The photo is decoded to raw pixels in your browser and re-encoded before upload, so none of that data exists in the file we receive. We never see where you were standing.

Photos are also resized and compressed on your device before they are sent, which keeps the upload small on a mobile connection.

What we store, and for how long

• the image itself, with the metadata above stripped
• which playground it belongs to, and the date it was sent
• the same random device identifier described above — not your name, not your email, not an account

Nothing is published until a person has reviewed it. A photo that is rejected is deleted from storage, not archived. A photo that is approved stays up until it is removed, and the page shows only the photo and its date — nothing that identifies who sent it. There is no public record connecting a photo to a contributor, and we do not publish one privately either.

Taking a photo down

Every published photo has a Report this photo control beneath it. Anyone can use it, without an account and without explaining why. The photo is hidden immediately, before any human looks at it, and a person reviews it afterwards. We would much rather take down a photo of a slide by mistake than leave up a photo of a child while we deliberate.

If you would rather write to us — because a photo shows your child, your home, or anything else that should not be there — use the contact route below and it will be handled the same way.

Accounts and reviews

Saving a playground and writing a review are the only two things on playdar that need an account. Nothing else does — not opening the map, not filtering, not adding equipment, not adding a photo.

Signing in

There is no password. You give us an email address, we send a one-time link, and clicking it signs you in. We use that email for exactly one thing: sending you that link, and any future one you ask for. We do not send newsletters, marketing, or anything you have not asked for, and we do not sell or share it.

You choose a display name when you first sign in, and it is what shows on any review you write — never your email address. You can change it at any time from the account page.

What an account stores

• your email address, used only to sign you in
• your display name, if you set one
• the playgrounds you have saved
• any reviews you have written, and their star ratings

That is the whole list. No location history, no browsing history, nothing about which playgrounds you looked at but did not save or review — the analytics section below covers what we see in aggregate, and an account does not add to it.

Reviews

A review is checked before anyone else can see it, the same as a photo. It shows your display name, your star ratings, the date, and whatever you wrote — nothing else. You can edit or delete your own review at any time from the account page; editing takes it back out of view until it is checked again, since an edit is new content we have not looked at yet.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, from the account page. This removes your account and everything you have saved, straight away. Reviews you wrote stay up — the rating and what you wrote are still useful to the next parent — but your name comes off them and nothing is left connecting them back to you, on the page or in what we keep privately. There is no “are you sure” email loop and no waiting period: deleting is immediate and cannot be undone by us afterwards.

Analytics

We use Plausible, a privacy-focused analytics service. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and does not collect personal data or follow you to other sites. That is also why playdar has no cookie banner — there is nothing to consent to.

What we can see, in aggregate and never tied to a person:

• how many people opened the app, and which pages
• whether people use the map or the list
• which filters get used — the filter name, such as “accessible bathroom”, and nothing about the results
• which type of place gets opened: a Parks playground, a school yard, or a NYCHA play area
• whether Near me was tapped, and whether permission was granted or declined
• whether the “add to home screen” suggestion was shown, dismissed or accepted
• whether an equipment contribution was started and finished — the step reached, never the playground and never what was reported
• roughly, whether this browser has opened playdar before

What the analytics deliberately never see, account or not:

• Any location. Not coordinates, not a borough, not a neighbourhood.
• Which specific playground you opened. We record the type of record, not the place. Where your family is going is yours.
• Your name, your email address, or anything from your account. If you are signed in, Plausible has no way to know that and no way to connect what it sees to who you are — the account system above and this analytics system do not talk to each other.

If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, playdar loads no analytics at all.

What stays on your device

playdar stores two small things in your browser, which never leave it and which we cannot read:

• a flag noting you have opened playdar before, so the analytics above can distinguish a first visit from a later one
• a note, for the current session only, that you have already seen the location explainer, so it is not shown twice
• a count of how many times you have opened playdar, and whether you dismissed the “add to home screen” suggestion, so it is not offered on a first visit and never returns once you have waved it away
• the random device identifier described above, and an unfinished equipment contribution, saved as you tap so an interruption does not lose your work. A draft is deleted once submitted, and expires by itself after a week

Clearing your browser data removes all of it. The playground data itself is also cached so the app works offline; that is a copy of public City of New York data, not anything about you.

Getting in touch

The Report a problem links open your own email app with a message prefilled, including the name and reference of the place you were looking at. Send feedback opens the same email app with nothing filled in but a subject line. In both cases nothing is sent until you press send, and you can edit or delete any of it first. We use what you send only to answer you and to fix what you told us about.

We don't sell or share your data

We do not sell, rent, or share data with advertisers, brokers, or anyone else. There are no advertising trackers, no social media pixels, and no third-party scripts beyond the analytics described above.

Two services do see your device's IP address simply because your browser connects to them, as with any website: our analytics provider, which discards it without storing it, and OpenStreetMap, which serves the map tiles under its own privacy policy.

If you have an account, two more services are involved in making it work, and neither uses your email for anything beyond that: Supabase, which stores your account and sends the sign-in link when one is asked for, and Resend, which delivers that email. Neither is an advertiser, and neither receives anything from playdar beyond what is needed to send you that one link.

Children

playdar is built for parents and carers rather than children. Browsing, filtering, and adding equipment or a photo collect no personal data from anyone regardless of age. An account is different only in that it requires an email address to sign in — it is meant for the adult using the app, and our terms ask anyone under 18 to have a parent or guardian create it. We do not knowingly collect information from children through it.

Contributed photos are the one place where an image of a child could reach us despite that, which is why the photo section above describes three separate barriers — guidance before the camera, a check on your device, and human review before publication — and a takedown that acts first and asks afterwards. If you believe a published photo shows your child, report it on the photo itself or write to us; it comes down straight away.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, we will say so here and update the date below.

Last updated 7 August 2026 · Terms for contributions · Back to playdar