About Lantern
Lantern plans London walking routes that prefer lit, well-used streets after dark — and always shows the fastest route beside them, so the choice stays yours.
What Lantern is not
Lantern is not a safety guarantee. No route is safe, and no app can make one safe. Routing is one input to your own judgement. The data below is real but imperfect: lighting tags are incomplete, venue hours change, and crime data is monthly and anonymised. In an emergency, call 999.
Design principles
- Routes are pulled toward lit, active streets — no area is ever labelled “dangerous” or excluded.
- Crime data can nudge a route by at most a few percent; it can never remove a street. By day it has no effect at all.
- Only objective corrections are collected (a closed venue, a broken light) — never “felt unsafe” labels, which research shows encode bias against poorer and minority neighbourhoods.
- Free for everyone, forever. Charging for safety information would be wrong.
Privacy
- No accounts, no cookies, no advertising, no third-party analytics trackers.
- Your location is used on your device to plan and follow routes; it is not stored.
- Route requests are processed in memory; we keep only aggregate counts (e.g. “routes planned per day”) under a random, hashed per-install identifier — never locations or searches.
- Data-correction reports store the report kind, a coordinate, and an optional venue name — nothing about you.
Data sources & attribution
- Street network, lighting (
lit=*), venues and opening hours: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. - Crime data: data.police.uk, Open Government Licence v3. Only violence, robbery and anti-social-behaviour categories are used, heavily capped.
- Basemap: © CARTO, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
- Address search: Photon by komoot (OSM data).
- Station locations: OpenStreetMap; TfL open data informs the design.
More
Contact
Lantern is an open, non-commercial student project. Found something wrong? Use the in-app “Something wrong?” report, or email rezamerchant2008@gmail.com.