Coarse city only. Precise location is never stored.
Last updated September 19, 2026Effective September 19, 2026
Location is the part of an app people worry about most, and usually with good reason. This explains exactly how The Way uses it.
The short version
Your precise location is used only while you are actively using the app — to answer “which churches are near me?” and to work out distance.
Your precise location is never stored. Not on your profile, not in a history, not in a log of where you have been.
Only a coarse, city-level location is saved to your account.
Other members never see where you are. They see a city, and where distance appears at all, a band such as “within 5 miles”.
You can say no, and the app still works. Type a city, ZIP, or neighborhood instead.
Two different things called “location”
Precise location is the reading your phone gives us — accurate to a street or a building. It answers “what is near me right now?”
Coarse location is a city. “Silver Spring, MD.” That is the granularity we keep.
The distinction matters because the two carry very different risk. A city tells someone which metro area you worship in. A precise coordinate tells someone where you sleep.
Precise location: used while in use, never stored
When you grant location permission and the app needs it:
When you close the app or move on, that reading is gone.
We read your position while the app is open and you are using it. We do not request background or “always” location permission.
We use it in the moment — to sort churches by distance, centre a map, or show how far an event is.
We do not write it anywhere. It is not saved to your profile, not appended to a history, not attached to your searches, not sent to other members, and not retained after the search context it served.
We do not sell it, share it with data brokers, or use it for advertising.
Coarse location: what we actually keep
We save one general, city-level location on your account — the area you are searching in.
That is what lets the app open in the right place next time, show you churches in your area, and match you with people who worship in the same city. It is the only location information stored against your account, and you can change or clear it at any time in the app.
What other people can see
Within Intentional Fellowship the limit is tighter still: city-level location and distance bands only, never neighborhood-level or finer.
Your city or neighborhood — nothing finer. This applies on your profile, in groups, in events, and in Intentional Fellowship.
A distance band, where distance is shown at all — “within 5 miles”, not “1.3 miles”. Bands are calculated from an approximated position, deliberately rounded before any comparison, so an exact figure cannot be reconstructed from them.
Never your exact position, and never a live position. Nobody can see you moving, and nobody can see where you were yesterday.
Churches, events, and venues
Location precision works differently for places than for people.
Church addresses are exact and public. A church is a public venue, and finding it is the point of the app.
Public events may show an exact address, because they are open to anyone.
Restricted and private events show only a neighborhood publicly. The exact address is revealed only to approved attendees.
Home-hosted gatherings never leak an exact address to anyone who has not been approved.
If you say no to location permission
Everything still works. Declining the permission is a legitimate choice, not a degraded mode.
Enter a city, ZIP, or neighborhood by hand and search from there.
Search results, distances, filters, and saving all behave the same way.
We explain why location helps before we ask for it, and we will not ask again and again after you decline.
Changing your mind
In The Way: Settings, then Privacy & Safety, then Precise location. Turn it off and the app falls back to the city you enter.
On your device: iOS Settings, then The Way, then Location. You can revoke the permission entirely, or grant only approximate location. The app handles both.
Turning precise location off does not delete anything, because there was nothing precise stored to delete. To change or clear the coarse city we hold, edit it in the app.
Location and safety
Location is a safety matter as much as a privacy one. A few things worth knowing:
Because we never store precise location, there is no location history for anyone to obtain — not another member, not an attacker who compromised an account, not us.
Blocking someone removes their access to your profile entirely, including your city. They are not told.
Photos can leak location even when the app does not. A house number, a street sign, a parking permit, or a church bulletin in the background can say more than you intended.
If you are meeting someone from Intentional Fellowship, please read the Intentional Fellowship Safety guidance. Meeting in a public place matters more than any setting in this document.
Where this fits
This document expands on the location section of our Privacy Policy. Where anything here is unclear, the Privacy Policy governs.
Questions
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