Safety
Safe and private, just for your village or neighbourhood
Buurtmaat is not a public social network. Here you can read who gets in, how moderation works and what happens to your data.
Only residents get in
You join with the letter delivered to your address. There is no public sign-up.
- Every residential address gets a letter with a personal code and a QR code. Without that code you can't get in.
- With one letter, up to five people at the same address can create an account.
- Members of your village or neighbourhood see what you post. People from other villages or neighbourhoods see nothing of you, and nothing is public on the internet.
- Only you and the other person can read a private message, not even moderators.
Everyone is recognisable
On open platforms and in many Facebook groups, someone can hide behind a pseudonym to insult, threaten or spread nonsense without any consequences. Research shows that anonymity and likes encourage this. Under newspaper articles, more than half of the anonymous comments were rude or hateful, against about three in ten of the comments with a name. And likes and shares reward outrage, so people post more of it. That is why Buurtmaat is set up differently.
- Everyone takes part under their own name and lives in the village or neighbourhood: the code comes with the letter to a real address. Your neighbours see your name and your street.
- No likes. Nobody collects thumbs-up, so an angry comment gets you nothing.
- No insults or threats. The house rules forbid them, the automatic check stops a threat before others see it, and moderators can block an account.
- No fake news. The automatic check first passes anything that may be misleading to a moderator. You recognise posts from the municipality by the Official badge.
- No manipulation. Posts appear in the order they were posted; only a pinned post stays at the top. There is no algorithm that chooses what you see, and political campaigns are not allowed.
- No paid adverts. Nobody pays to get in front of you, and advertising and trading are not allowed.
Moderation in three layers
Everyone agrees to the house rules when signing up. Three layers make sure those rules apply.
- An automatic check looks at posts, help requests, listings, activities, items in the sharing cupboard and comments before others see them. Others only see a threat or a scam once a moderator has looked at it.
- Residents report anything that isn't right, anonymously. Moderators from the village or neighbourhood itself decide on it. They can hide something or block an account.
- AnchorWorks keeps an eye on serious cases in all villages and neighbourhoods and can step in.
- You can block someone yourself. You then no longer see each other's content and can't respond to each other or send each other a private message.
Your data stays yours
Buurtmaat works in line with the GDPR and only keeps what is needed to make the app work.
- Buurtmaat has no adverts and no like counters. We don't sell your data and don't build profiles of you for advertising.
- Buurtmaat doesn't use tracking, marketing or analytics cookies. The website's visitor statistics also work without cookies.
- When translating, only the text goes to the language model, never your name or your address. Buurtmaat first replaces neighbours' names, addresses and phone numbers in the text.
- The reporting for the organisation only contains rounded numbers, never names or addresses.
- Buurtmaat deletes what needs to go automatically. Posts in the village or neighbourhood, for example, 12 months after they were posted.