Safety

Meeting a stranger is a real thing to do and this page is about the parts of it that are our job.

Everything starts in a public place

Churr does not suggest somebody’s home, and it cannot. Every first plan is at a public place — a park, a square, a market, a rink, a café on a busy street — from a list of 48 places across Toronto that were chosen for being easy to find, easy to leave, and busy enough that you are not alone.

There is a person there

New accounts go through a liveness check: a few seconds of your own camera, following a couple of prompts, to establish that there is a live human being on the other side. The frames are used for the check and are not kept as a photo album.

Blocking, and reporting

You can block anybody in one tap, from anywhere they appear. Reporting somebody blocks them from you straight away — before anybody has read the report — because the alternative is asking somebody to wait to be safe while we do paperwork. Reports are read by a person.

A trusted contact

You can save one person — a friend, a sibling, a parent — as a trusted contact. Then, on any plan, one tap writes them a text from your own phone saying where you are going and when. Churr never stores the number itself, never sends the message for you, and the text carries a place and a time and nothing else: no names, no phone numbers, no link into the app.

What your twin will not say

Your twin is a description you read and approved. Anything you mark private stays in your account. Your twin does not carry your address, your workplace, your phone number or your last name, because it was never given them to carry.

If something goes wrong

Write to [email protected] and a person will read it. If somebody is in immediate danger, call 911 first — we are not an emergency service and we will not pretend to be one.

Safety tips in full · Community guidelines · Law enforcement requests