Real-time hazard alerts sourced from official channels and your community, private family location sharing with a one-tap SOS, and on-device AI face matching against public watchlists. Built with privacy as a first principle.
Searching the App Store instead? Look for "SpotterApp" — "Spotter" alone belongs to a different, unrelated app.
Built with enterprise-grade infrastructure
We completely reimagined community safety. No ads, no tracking, just powerful tools to keep your neighborhood and family secure.
Alert your community instantly about local hazards and incidents. Drop a flare, and notify everyone nearby in milliseconds.
Scan against your secure vault entirely on-device using advanced CoreML. No cloud processing means total privacy and instant results.
Keep track of your loved ones on a private map — invites require approval on both sides. Pause sharing anytime, or share an approximate, suburb-level location instead of your exact position.
Send an instant alert with a custom message to your family circle when you need help — no fumbling through menus in an urgent moment.
Browse profiles sourced from the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre, and optionally run an on-device face match against your camera to help.
Got a photo from a doorbell camera, a group chat, or a news article? Share it directly into Spotter to run a face match, without leaving the app you're in.
Set your own notification radius per alert category, from 1km up to 30km, so you only get the alerts that are actually relevant to you.
Reporting shouldn't compromise your safety. For non-critical alerts, Spotter uses location obfuscation, showing a generalized shaded zone instead of your exact GPS pin.
We'd rather tell you exactly what happens to your data than make vague promises. Here's the honest breakdown.
Face comparison runs entirely on your device using CoreML. Photos and face data are never uploaded — matching happens locally, against public wanted/missing-persons watchlists or your own private list, and nothing leaves your phone.
Family location updates travel over encrypted (TLS) connections and are only ever visible to family members who've explicitly accepted your invite. We don't sell location data or share it with third parties. We're not claiming zero-knowledge here — the server needs to route locations to approved family members to make live sharing work at all — and we'd rather say that plainly than overstate it.
Spotter was born out of a simple idea: communities should be able to protect each other without sacrificing their privacy. We believe technology can help neighborhoods stay informed and families stay connected, built by being upfront about what data we handle and why — not by overselling what "private" means.
Spotter is built and maintained by Anil Sharma, a software engineer based in Australia. Questions, feedback, or concerns — get in touch.
Straight answers, including the hard ones.
It's not a general "search anyone" tool. Face matching only runs against closed, named lists — public wanted/missing-persons registries, or your own private list — never a general web or social-media search. Comparison happens entirely on your device; photos are never uploaded anywhere. That's a deliberate design choice, not a limitation we're working around.
Every connection requires mutual approval — no one can add you without your consent. You can pause sharing, or switch to an approximate suburb-level location instead of your exact position, at any time. Removing a connection takes effect immediately and isn't announced to the removed person, so leaving quietly doesn't tip anyone off. It's not a perfect solution to a hard problem, but it's one we keep working on.
We'd rather be precise than reassuring. Face data never leaves your device — that part is genuinely zero-knowledge. Family location is transmitted over an encrypted (TLS) connection and only shared with people you've approved, but it isn't end-to-end encrypted — our server needs to route it to make live sharing work. See the Security section and our Privacy Policy for the full breakdown.
You should still use them — Spotter isn't a replacement for official emergency channels, and we say that explicitly in the app. What Spotter adds is bringing multiple official feeds (VicEmergency, stolen vehicle registers, missing persons) together with family safety tools in one place, instead of checking several separate sources.
Spotter is built and maintained by Anil Sharma, a software engineer based in Australia — not a government body. Questions or concerns are welcome any time at admin@spotterapp.com.au.
Have questions, feedback, or need support? We're here to help.