Legal

Privacy policy.

A safety app knows where you are and who you trust. This page says what we collect, why we are allowed to, how long we keep it — and, in detail, what happens to your location during an alarm and between alarms.

Last updated: 7 August 2026

ProTechMe is a personal safety service. Most of the people using it are using it for themselves — walking home at night, running or cycling alone, commuting late, meeting someone new, travelling, living alone, working a night shift. Some are lone workers covered by an employer. Some are older people, or the staff of an institution.

Whichever you are, the consequence of us mishandling this data is not an inconvenience. It is the exact harm you downloaded the app to avoid. That is why this page is longer and more specific than it needs to be, and why the parts we have not finished documenting are marked as unfinished instead of filled in with a comfortable guess.

Who is responsible for your data

ProTechMe is the international brand of Linucare ApS, a Danish company. Linucare ApS is the data controller for the personal data described on this page. Wherever this page says “we”, it means Linucare ApS.

Linucare ApS
Beddingen 9, 6. sal
9000 Aalborg, Denmark
CVR 44214946
contact@protechme.com
+45 30 70 60 20

Anything on this page — a request to see your data, a request to delete it, or a question you would rather ask before signing up — goes to that address and reaches a person.

In plain language

No person sees your location unless you raise an alarm. Not us, not your contacts, not the community.
Your phone does work out where you are in the background. That is how the “five nearest users” tier can exist at all. It is processing without a human on the other end, and it is explained in full below — we will not bury it.
We do not sell your data, and we do not run advertising on it. Ever.
An alarm goes to the contacts you chose. Only if none of them respond does it reach the five nearest ProTechMe users.
You can delete your account and your data from inside the app, at any time.

What we collect

Data	Examples	Where it comes from
Account data	Name, email address, phone number, login credentials, language.	You, at signup.
Your safety network	The groups you create and the contacts you put in them — their name and phone number or email.	You, when you add them.
Location	Your position, and how far you are from other users.	Your device. See the location section below — this one deserves its own explanation.
Alarm and incident records	When an alarm was raised, how it was triggered (app, button, fall detection), who was notified, who responded, when it was closed, and any preset message you attached to it.	Generated by the service when an alarm runs.
Voice and chat during an alarm	Two-way voice and the in-app chat thread for an active alarm.	You and the people responding. See the voice and chat section below.
Device and app data	Device model, operating system and app version, push notification token, and whether the permissions the alarm depends on are actually granted.	Your device. The last one matters: without it, neither you nor we can tell that your alarm would fail before the moment you need it.
Orders and support	What you wrote to us, and — if you bought hardware — your order and delivery details.	You. Note that this website does not take payment; hardware is sold through Linucare or a regional distributor.
Website data	What a web server unavoidably sees, plus two third-party embeds.	Your browser. Detailed separately in the cookie policy.

About the people you add. When you put someone in your safety network you are giving us their phone number and asking us to contact them on your behalf, possibly in the middle of the night. Add people who expect to be there. We use those details only to reach them about your alarms, and they can ask us to remove themselves at the address above.

Location: what is shared, and what is only evaluated

Elsewhere this site says your location is shared only during an alarm. The app also asks for “Always” location permission. Both are true, and the difference between them is the single most important thing on this page.

1. Location shared with people — only during an alarm

Your position is shown to another human being only while an alarm you raised is active. During that alarm, the contacts you chose — and, if none of them respond, the five nearest users — see where you are, how far away they are, and how to get to you. When the alarm is closed, that live view ends. Outside an alarm there is no screen, anywhere, showing where you are.

2. Location processed in the background — so “nearest” can mean something

The community tier promises the five nearest users. Nothing can work out who is nearest to you at 02:00 unless positions are being evaluated before the alarm, not after. That is what the background permission is for: your phone keeps a current position available so the proximity ranking can be computed the instant an alarm needs it. No person reads the result, and it is not used to build a history of your movements, profile you, or sell anything.

Still being documented. We are documenting the exact behaviour of that background position — whether any position is written to storage or only held and evaluated in the moment, at what precision, and how quickly it is replaced. We will publish the specifics here. We would rather leave this paragraph visibly unfinished than state a retention period we have not verified end to end.

If you turn it off

You can refuse or downgrade background location in your device settings at any time, and we will not nag you into re-enabling it. The honest consequence: the nearest-user tier can no longer find you, so your alarm would rely on the contacts you chose. The app still works; one of its three tiers does not.

Why we spell this out

If you are using this app because of a specific person, an app with a continuous line to your location is not a footnote in a policy — it is the first thing you would need to know, and the thing you would need to be able to check. So we have separated the two meanings of “location” instead of letting one sentence cover both.

Two-way voice and in-app chat

During an active alarm you can talk to the people responding, and there is a chat thread attached to the alarm. Both are advertised across this site, so both belong here.

Voice. In the app, voice runs between you and the people responding to your alarm. With the GPS button, the device places a full-duplex call over its built-in SIM — and as with any mobile call, the mobile operator carrying it handles the connection data the way operators always do.

Chat. Messages in an alarm thread pass through our servers, which by definition means they exist there at least long enough to be delivered to a phone that may be locked, silenced, or briefly offline.

Still being documented. Three things we will not guess at: whether alarm audio is recorded anywhere or only relayed; whether a chat thread survives the alarm being closed, and for how long; and who — you, a responder, our support team — can retrieve either afterwards. Our intent is that audio is relayed and never recorded, and that nobody can listen back to your alarm. We are confirming that end to end before we print it as a promise.

The community tier: what a helper sees

If nobody in your own network responds, your alarm reaches the five nearest ProTechMe users. That is a stranger being told where you are, so it needs to be described precisely rather than warmly.

What they get. A responding user is shown that an alarm is active near them, your position, the distance, and directions to you — that is what makes the tier useful at all.

Still being documented. We are still writing down, exactly: which of your details beyond position are shown to a community responder (name, photo, the preset message you attached); how long their access survives the alarm being closed — our intent is that it ends with the alarm; whether a responder’s own position is revealed to you, and at what precision; and what, precisely, is verified about a person at signup.

What we will say now, because the alternative is letting you assume something safer than the truth: being a ProTechMe user is not a background check, and you should not read it as one. The community tier is a last resort after your own people, not a vetted patrol.

Reporting someone. If a responder — or anyone in your own network — behaves in a way that frightens you, write to contact@protechme.com and we will act on it, including removing an account. You can remove anyone from your own network yourself, at any time, in the app.

Why we are allowed to use it

Under the GDPR every purpose needs a legal basis. Ours, purpose by purpose:

Purpose	Legal basis
Creating and running your account	Performance of a contract with you — Art. 6(1)(b).
Delivering an alarm to the contacts you chose, and escalating it if nobody answers	Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b). This is the service itself.
Access to your device location, including in the background for proximity	Your consent — Art. 6(1)(a) — given through the operating system permission prompt and withdrawable at any time in your device settings.
Keeping a record of an alarm afterwards (incident log)	Our legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f): so you and the people who responded can see what happened, so we can investigate misuse, and so we can find out why an alarm did not behave as it should.
Keeping accounts secure and preventing abuse of the alarm network	Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f).
Answering your emails and support requests	Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f) — or contract, if it concerns your order.
Selling, shipping and warranting hardware	Contract — Art. 6(1)(b) — plus legal obligation, Art. 6(1)(c), for accounting records.
Sending you email you asked for	Your consent — Art. 6(1)(a). Withdrawable in one click, and withdrawing it never affects your alarm.

One thing worth flagging. The preset message you can attach to an alarm is free text, and people use it for things like medication or a medical condition. That makes it health data under Art. 9, which needs a stronger basis: your explicit consent, given by choosing to write it. You decide what goes in that field, and you can empty it.

How long we keep it

Data	How long
Account data and your safety network	For as long as your account exists. Deleting your account deletes it.
Alarm and incident records	Kept as part of your incident history while your account exists. We have not yet fixed a maximum period, and we are setting one rather than keeping them indefinitely by default.
Location records	Location that leaves your phone does so as part of an alarm, and lives in that alarm record. Whether any position is retained outside an alarm is the open question described in the location section above.
Alarm voice and chat	Open — see the voice and chat section. We will not print a number we have not verified.
Support correspondence	For as long as needed to handle the matter and any follow-up.
Orders, invoices and accounting records	Five years from the end of the financial year, because Danish bookkeeping law requires it. This applies even after you delete your account.
Backups	Deleted data ages out of backups on the backup cycle rather than the instant you press delete.

Who else touches your data

We do not sell personal data, we do not share it with advertising networks or data brokers, and we do not hand it to anyone for their own purposes. We do use suppliers to run the service, and they process data on our instructions under a data processing agreement:

Cloud hosting and database — where the service and your account data run.
Push notification delivery — Apple and Google carry the alarm to the phones in your network. ProTechMe uses critical alerts on iOS and high-priority Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android, which is what lets an alarm break through a silenced phone.
SMS and telephony — where an alarm or a code is delivered by text, a gateway provider carries it; for the GPS button, a mobile operator carries the SIM connection and the voice call.
Email and support tooling — for the mail you send us.
Distributors — if you buy hardware in a market we serve through a distributor, that distributor handles your order as the seller.

Still being documented. We intend to publish the named list of sub-processors here, with each one’s role and country, rather than only these categories. Until it is published you can request the current list at the address above.

We will also disclose data where a court or a competent authority legally requires it — and we will tell you when we are permitted to.

Transfers outside Europe

We operate from Denmark and we operate in India, so personal data can be transferred outside the EU/EEA — to our own deployment there and to suppliers.

Still being documented. India is not covered by an EU adequacy decision, so transfers there have to rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses plus any additional safeguards the transfer needs. We are confirming that those clauses are executed with every non-EEA recipient before we state it here as a completed fact. Ask us and we will tell you where a specific transfer currently stands.

If you are in India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 applies to your data as well, and you can exercise your rights under it at the same address. Complaints under that Act go to the Data Protection Board of India.

Age: we are still setting this

Still being documented. We have not published a minimum age for a ProTechMe account, and we are not going to state one here until it is a real product decision. A specific limit briefly appeared on this page and in our terms; nothing in the product actually enforced it, so it has been removed rather than left standing as a rule we do not apply.

This matters more than it looks. Our own material talks about students, night buses and walking home — situations that describe 16- and 17-year-olds just as accurately as adults. If you believe a child has an account with us and you would like it removed, write to us and we will remove it.

How we protect it

Still being documented. Our intent is that traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit and that access to production data is limited to the people who need it to run the service. We are documenting the specifics — what is encrypted where, who holds access, and how that access is reviewed — and we will state them here once engineering has confirmed them. We would rather leave this section visibly unfinished than make a security representation we have not checked.

We make no certification claims on this site — no badge, no standard, no audit logo. If we ever hold one, we will name it here and you will be able to check it. Until then, treat the absence as the answer.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to:

tell you what data we hold about you, and give you a copy;
correct anything that is wrong;
delete your data — you can also do this yourself, in the app; the account deletion page walks through both routes and what survives deletion;
restrict or object to a particular use, including anything we base on legitimate interests;
export your data in a portable format;
withdraw a consent you gave — for location, or for email — without it affecting what we did legitimately before you withdrew it.

Write to contact@protechme.com. We answer within one month, as the GDPR requires, and usually much faster. We do not make decisions about you that have legal effects by automated means.

If you want to complain

Tell us first if you can — it is the fastest way to get something fixed. But you always have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Danish Data Protection Agency, Datatilsynet:

Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Agency)
www.datatilsynet.dk

If you live in another EU or EEA country, you can complain to your own national authority instead.

Changes to this policy

When we change something that matters, we change the date at the top of this page and say what moved. We will not quietly widen what we collect and leave you to find it in a diff.