A mobile app that helps people discover and organize protest events in Belgium and the Netherlands. Available on iOS and Android.

Website: protestbase.be

ProtestBase is a calendar of protests and demonstrations. Anyone can browse upcoming events, save the ones they're interested in, and get directions to the location. Verified organizers can publish their own events and reach a broader audience without depending on social-media gatekeepers.

The app is built around a simple idea: surfacing collective action shouldn't require giving up your privacy. Every feature is designed with that constraint in mind.

Privacy is the foundation the app is built on, not an afterthought. Here's what that actually means.

When you save an event, set your preferences, or browse the calendar, that information stays on your phone. We never see it, store it on our servers, or sync it across devices. Your saved events list lives in your device's encrypted secure storage.

If you use ProtestBase without an account — which is the default — we collect no personal data about you. There are no third-party analytics SDKs, no advertising trackers, and no behavioral fingerprinting. The app does not require an account to function.

The view counter you see on events records that someone opened the event. It does not record who. We don't tie views to devices, accounts, or sessions.

Our servers run in the European Union under GDPR. We don't sell your data, we don't share it with third parties, and we never will.

The app requests as little as possible from your device. Location, camera, and microphone access are deliberately not requested — the app does not need them. Photo access is only used when you choose to attach an image to an event you're creating. Calendar access is optional and only used to add events you've explicitly saved.

Verified organizers do log in to manage events. For those accounts we store login credentials (standard security) and the event data they publish. Everything in the sections above still applies to users who don't log in.

Our source code is publicly available so anyone can audit how we handle data. Trust, but verify.

Authentication runs on on-device attestation, not floating API keys. Every API call after the initial bootstrap is signed by a hardware-backed key on the device.

On Android we deliberately do not use Google Play Integrity. Attestation goes through the AndroidKeyStore directly, which means:

• It works on GrapheneOS and other privacy-focused Android distributions — no Google Play Services dependency.
• It works on devices that sideload the app — no Play Store install requirement.
• The backend can verify the certificate chain end-to-end against Google's hardware roots plus a GrapheneOS allowlist.

This is an unusual choice for an app distributed through the Play Store. We made it deliberately: supporting users who opt out of the Google ecosystem mattered more than relying on a service that locks them out.