The fine print
Privacy Policy
Last updated September 6, 2026
The short version
Next Bar helps you find NYC bars. Until you create an account, almost everything — your quiz answers, ratings, rankings, lists — lives in your browser on your device, not on our servers. If you sign in, your ratings and social graph sync to our database so they work across devices. We don't sell your data, and we don't show ads.
What we collect
- On your device only (signed out): vibe-quiz answers, bar ratings and comparisons, saved lists, app preferences, and your night log (the bars you tell us you're at, so we can recap your night) — stored in your browser's local storage and never sent to us.
- If you create an account: your email address, a username you choose, your bar ratings, rankings, and who you follow — plus everything you post: stories and the photos in them, the bar and people you tag on a story, groups you join and messages you send there, night outs you plan or join, and the “I'm here” presence pin you share with friends (a bar you pick by hand — never GPS — and it expires at 4:00 AM). All of it is stored with our database provider (Supabase) so it works across devices.
- If you join the waitlist: your email, the neighborhood you picked, and — if you took the quiz first — your vibe profile, so your early-access invite matches your taste. That's the one time signed-out quiz answers leave your device.
- Location: nearby suggestions use your browser's location permission or a starting point you choose. Travel times calculate automatically: that starting point and candidate destinations pass through our server to openrouteservice. Next Bar does not save a precise-location history or include your origin in public share links. Opening directions sends the starting point and destination to Google Maps. External providers handle requests under their own privacy policies; route estimates stay only in the active view.
What we don't do
- No selling or renting your personal data. Ever.
- No third-party advertising or ad trackers.
- Your 1.0–10.0 scores go to your followers and nobody else. No public page and no shared link ever carries a score. Two things about that are worth knowing rather than discovering: while your account is public, anyone signed in can follow you without your approval and will then see your scores — turn on the private-account setting in Settings to approve each follower first, and existing followers keep the access they already have. And if you opt your list into public sharing, the tier you gave a bar (loved, liked, pass) becomes visible to anyone, including people who are not signed in; that opt-in is off unless you turn it on, and it never exposes the numeric score.
Who else touches data
Bar photos, hours, and review snippets come from Google Places and are cached on our side. Bar photos are sourced from Google (Places); photographer attribution is shown in the photo viewer and is available on request. Our database and sign-in run on Supabase. Hosting is on Vercel. Each of these providers processes data under their own terms; none of them get your ratings or social graph for their own use.
Age
Next Bar is for people 21 and older (it's about bars). We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 21.
Deleting your data
Signed-out data can be wiped any time from Settings → Clear all ratings, or by clearing your browser storage. Signed in, go to Settings → Delete account: it permanently and immediately removes your login, profile, ratings, rankings, follows, stories, night outs, presence pins, and group memberships. Messages you already sent to a group stay visible to its members, with your name detached. Photos you posted stop being reachable through the app at the same moment; clearing the leftover files out of our storage systems is a cleanup we run on our side — email us and we'll scrub them right away and confirm. Prefer a human for the whole thing? Email us and we'll do it for you.
Contact
Next Bar is an independent, individually operated service based in New York. Questions or requests: hi@next-bar.app. Privacy requests get a reply within a few days.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll note it here with a new date up top.