Privacy

Knock Twice has no accounts. The list is public licence data, the same for everyone. If you vote on a venue, we store the vote against a random id your browser made up, and nothing else about you. If you ask for the nearest venues first, your location is used inside your browser and is never sent to us. If you open the map, its background is loaded from CARTO. We count page views, votes and errors, never where you are.

Knock Twice shows a list of licensed venues built from the public Victorian liquor licence register. Everyone gets the same list. When you vote on whether a venue is a secret bar, the server stores the venue, your choice, the time and a random id your browser made up so one browser cannot vote twice; no name, account or internet address is kept with it, and pressing your choice again deletes the vote. Marking a venue closed down is not sent anywhere: it stays in this browser. When you order the list by distance, your browser reads your location and does the sorting itself: your position is not sent to our server or anyone else. When you open the map, your browser loads the background map from CARTO, which therefore sees your device's address and the area you are looking at. Page views (as a route, not a full address), a count of votes by choice, and errors go to Lotl Observe, which we operate. The list itself is prepared ahead of time from the licence register, OpenStreetMap and, for some venues, Google Places; those lookups are about venues and send nothing about you. Tapping Open in Google Maps on a venue opens Google's site, which then sees your device like any website would.

What we collect

Here is everything that leaves your browser, and what stays in it:

Your votes: When you vote on whether a venue is a secret bar, the server stores the venue, your choice, the time, and a random id your browser made up (knocktwice.voter) so the same browser cannot vote twice. The id is not derived from anything about you or your device. No name, account or internet address is stored with a vote. Your internet address is used for a few minutes, in memory only, to stop one source flooding the vote. Pressing your choice again withdraws the vote and deletes the row.Stored on our server. Kept until you delete it. until you withdraw the vote; votes for a venue that leaves the list are kept but no longer shown. Legal basis: legitimate interests. Removable on request.
Kept in your browser: A copy of your own votes and which venues you marked closed (knocktwice.verdicts), and the random voter id (knocktwice.voter), stored in localStorage in this browser. Clearing your browsing data deletes them; votes already sent stay on the server, and a browser with a new id can no longer withdraw them. A tab-only flag in sessionStorage (knocktwice.reloaded) also remembers that the page already reloaded once after an update.Stored in your browser (localStorage). Kept until you delete it. Legal basis: legitimate interests. Removable on request.
Usage telemetry: Page views, reported as the route (such as /about) rather than the full address, and errors the app throws, sent to Lotl Observe. Also a count of votes cast, by choice (secret, not secret, withdrawn) and never by venue. Never your location, and never which venues you looked at.Stored on our server. Kept permanently. as daily counts; the raw events are deleted after 90 days. Legal basis: legitimate interests. Not individually deletable. Shared with: Lotl Observe.

Third parties

These external services receive some of your data:

CartoDB — browser-side basemap tiles for the map view, loaded only when you open the map (the tile URLs encode your map viewport)
DigitalOcean — hosting for Knock Twice
Google APIs — Places API lookups about venues when the list is prepared (nothing about you is sent). The Google Maps link on a venue opens Google only when you tap it.
OpenStreetMap — Map data used when the list is prepared, to check whether a venue is mapped (ODbL, credited on screen). Nothing about you is sent.
Victorian Government open data (Liquor Control Victoria) — The public liquor licence register the list is built from, downloaded when the list is prepared: nothing about you is sent.

Where your data is stored

Votes and telemetry are stored on Lotlsoft's own server. The map background is served by CARTO's content delivery network, which may answer from outside Australia.

Your rights

Your votes can be withdrawn by pressing the same choice again in the browser you voted from, which deletes them from our server. A vote is not linked to a name or account, so we cannot find your votes for you; if you have cleared the browser you voted from, email hello@lotlsoft.com and we will remove votes if you can tell us the venues and roughly when. Your closed-down marks live in this browser: clearing its site data removes them. Your location is never sent, so there is nothing of it to delete.

Last updated: 2026-10-06.