Shire Reeve — Privacy Notice
Last updated: 2026-10-19
Shire Reeve has no account, no Kalmaro server, no ads, no analytics and no tracking. Your sightings, watched areas and followed notices are kept on your device. To show crime and wanted notices, the app asks the public organisations that publish them for the area you are looking at. If — and only if — you turn sharing on and choose to share a sighting, a reduced version of it goes to a public pool that other users can read, under a pseudonymous iCloud identifier.
What stays on your device
Your sightings, the notices you follow, the areas you watch, your settings and the crime and wanted data the app has downloaded are stored in a database on your device. That database is not synced to your iCloud account and is not sent to Kalmaro. A photo you attach to one of your own sightings stays on your device too; the app removes its location and other metadata when it saves it, and a photo is never part of a shared sighting. Removing the app removes all of this from that device.
What the app asks public data providers for
To show crime and wanted notices, the app sends requests straight from your device to the organisations that publish the data: data.police.uk for England, Wales and Northern Ireland; the open-data portals of ten US cities (Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo and Baton Rouge — Philadelphia’s is hosted by Carto); INTERPOL; and the FBI. Crime requests include the map area you are viewing or the areas you watch, so those providers can see which places you looked at, together with your device’s network address, as with any web request. The Apple Watch app fetches wanted notices from INTERPOL and the FBI itself. None of these requests passes through Kalmaro, no account or key identifies you to them, and each provider’s own privacy terms apply to what it receives. The map itself is drawn by Apple Maps, under Apple’s terms.
The London fire layer (off by default)
If you turn on the fire and animal-rescue layer, the app reads monthly London Fire Brigade figures that Kalmaro has published to a public iCloud database. The request names the London boroughs on screen and the month you chose, and goes to Apple’s iCloud servers. The layer only reads: nothing you do with it is written anywhere.
Shared sightings (optional, off by default)
Sharing is off until you turn it on and accept the sharing terms, and even then each sighting is shared only if you choose to share that one. A shared sighting is written to a public iCloud database that anyone using the app can read, and contains: a location snapped to a grid of about 1 km, the time rounded down to the hour, the notice it relates to, a few fixed descriptive choices, and an optional note of up to 140 characters, which is filtered for links, email addresses, phone numbers, social handles and street addresses. Photos are never shared. Sightings of missing people are never shared.
iCloud attaches an identifier for your iCloud account to every record you write. It is not your name or email address, but it links the sightings written from the same account, so shared sightings are pseudonymous, not anonymous. Shire Reeve has no account of its own to link them to.
While sharing is on, the app also registers with iCloud for alerts about sightings near the areas you watch. That registration, made from iPhone, stores the grid cells — each about 11 km across — that cover your watched areas, and is removed once you turn sharing off. Browsing nearby shared sightings — which anyone can do, signed in or not — asks iCloud for sightings around a point snapped to the same 1 km grid. Writing or flagging needs you to be signed in to iCloud; reading does not.
Removing a shared sighting, flags and moderation
You can remove a shared sighting at any time by deleting it, or by choosing Remove from Shared Pool; if you are offline, the removal completes the next time the app has a connection. Turning sharing off offers to remove everything you have shared. Nothing in the shared pool expires on its own: a sighting stays until it is removed by you or by moderation. Other users can flag a sighting — it is hidden for everyone once three people have flagged it — and a flag is itself a record in the same public database, naming the sighting and carrying the flagger’s iCloud identifier. Users can also block the person who shared it; a block is stored only on the blocking user’s device. No more than five sightings from one sharer are shown in a place, and no more than two alerts from one sharer, or six in total, reach you in 24 hours. Kalmaro reviews flagged sightings daily, deletes sightings that break the rules, and can remove a user’s sightings from the pool for everyone. To report a problem, use the support page.
INTERPOL photo links (optional, off by default)
If you turn on “Share INTERPOL photo links” and are signed in to iCloud, the app can publish a list of the public INTERPOL photo addresses it has already looked up, so that other devices can skip looking them up again. Every copy of the app may read that list. It contains no information about you, your location or your sightings.
Permissions and notifications
Location, only while you are using the app: to centre the map, to suggest areas to watch, and to place a sighting you choose to record. Anything you share with other users is reduced to about 1 km. Notifications, only after you agree when asked: for areas you watch, notices you follow and, if you have turned sharing on, sightings near your watched areas. The app checks for changes on your device and posts those notifications itself; alerts about shared sightings arrive as silent messages from iCloud that the app checks before showing anything. Shire Reeve does not ask for the camera, your contacts or health data, and a photo is attached with the system picker, which gives the app only the picture you choose.
Third parties, tracking and purchases
Shire Reeve contains no advertising, no analytics and no tracking, and includes no third-party software libraries. It does not track you across other companies’ apps or websites. It has no in-app purchases and no subscription. Notifications and the shared pool rely on Apple’s push and iCloud services, which have their own privacy terms.
What the App Store label says, and who to ask
Because shared sightings are written to a database that Kalmaro and other users can read, Shire Reeve’s App Store privacy label is not ‘Data Not Collected’. It declares three data types, all linked to you, none used for tracking and all for app functionality: coarse location (the ~1 km area), other user content (the note) and a user ID (the iCloud identifier). None of them leaves your device unless you share or flag a sighting, or turn on INTERPOL photo links, whose record carries only the iCloud identifier. If you have a question about privacy or want to exercise your rights, see the main privacy policy, which carries the contact address.