Most safety apps ask you to create an account. They want your name, your address, your phone number. Some of that is understandable. But we kept asking ourselves: what do you actually need to help someone report a safety concern to their community?
The answer, we discovered, is almost nothing.
You need to know roughly where something happened. You need a description. And you need somewhere for that report to go. You do not need to know who sent it.
That insight shaped everything about how VeiligWijdemeren was built. The platform is anonymous by design — not as a feature we added, but as a principle we started from. No accounts. No tracking. No personal data stored on our servers.
This created some interesting technical constraints. Without user accounts, how do you prevent spam? How do you let people follow up on a report they made? How do you build any sense of community around the platform?
We solved each of these problems without compromising the core principle. Reports are validated through community moderation rather than identity verification. Follow-ups use session-based references that expire. Community information is broadcast, not personalised.
The result is a platform that residents genuinely trust — because they can see, clearly and concisely, that there is nothing to worry about. No data to be leaked. No account to be hacked. No profile being built.
We think this is the right way to build community technology. And we think the instinct to collect more data than you need is something the industry needs to challenge more directly.