The whole point of a ShieldTag is that a stranger can reach you without a stranger ever knowing who you are. That only works because of how the messaging relay is built underneath it — not just a policy promise, but a deliberate design choice about what information moves where, and what never gets shown to either side.
What the QR code actually encodes
The QR code printed on a ShieldTag encodes a single opaque identifier — nothing that identifies you, your pet, your car, or anything else. Scanning it opens a page tied to that ID, and that page is where a finder types a message. If a tag is lost, photographed, or even stolen, it reveals nothing about you on its own. The identifier is meaningless outside of ShieldTag’s own systems, the same way a claim-check ticket at a coat room means nothing to anyone except the person holding it and the counter it matches.
How a message actually travels
When someone scans your tag and sends a message, it doesn't go directly to your phone number. It goes to ShieldTag first, and ShieldTag forwards it to you as a text. Your number is never exposed to the finder at any point in that path. If you reply, the same thing happens in reverse — your reply goes through the relay to them, and their number is never shown to you either, unless they've chosen to share other contact details inside the message itself.
- The finder never sees your phone number, on the first message or any reply
- You never see the finder’s phone number unless they choose to share it
- The tag itself carries no name, phone number, or address — only the opaque ID
What ShieldTag holds — and what it doesn’t
To make the relay work at all, ShieldTag has to hold some information: your name, your phone number or email, your notification preferences, and the scan-and-message history for your tags so you can see who has reached out. If you’re on a paid plan, payment details are handled by our payment processor and never stored on our own servers.
There's an equally deliberate list of what we don't hold. There is no real-time GPS location of you, your vehicle, or anything you've tagged — the system has no location capability at all. There's no identity of whoever scans your tag unless they choose to share it by replying. And your phone number is never shown to anyone who scans your tag, ever, under any plan.
No tracking, by design
ShieldTag has no GPS and does not log where a tag is scanned from. The relay only activates the moment a real person scans a tag and chooses to send a message — there is nothing running in the background.
Why it’s built this way
A tag that just printed your phone number on it would be simpler to build, but it would hand that number to everyone who ever saw the tag, forever, with no way to revoke it. Routing every message through a relay means the tag itself can be reprinted, replaced, or even photographed without leaking anything — and it means you decide, message by message, whether a conversation with a stranger goes any further than the first note they send you.