Jerk AlertPress Kit
Everything needed to write about Jerk Alert without emailing us first. Copy anything on this page verbatim. If you need something that isn't here, ask — we answer press mail same day.
Media contact
| Press contact | Ned Winter, Founder |
|---|---|
| support@jerkalert.org — put PRESS in the subject line | |
| Response time | Same day for press enquiries |
| Interviews | The founder is available for interviews, podcasts, and on-record debate on the ethics of public driving records. |
Boilerplate
Two lengths, both cleared for verbatim use.
Jerk Alert is a free mobile app for logging and looking up driving behavior by license plate. A report is a plate, a location, one of 25 fixed categories and a severity rating — there is no free-text field, no photo upload and no reply, so there is nothing a member can type that another member will read. Plates identify vehicles, not people: the app runs no owner lookups and holds no DMV data. Reports roll up into a plate's Erk Score. Jerk Alert is made by Jerk Alert LLC, a New Mexico company, and is free with no advertising and no in-app purchases.
Jerk Alert is a free mobile app that turns driving behavior into a public record, one license plate at a time. Somebody cuts you off; ten seconds later there is a structured report attached to that plate, visible to every other driver who looks it up.
What makes it unusual is what it deliberately cannot do. A report is assembled from four fixed inputs — a plate and state, a location chosen from a curated list, one of 25 preset behavior categories, and a severity from 1 to 5. There is no comment box, no caption, no reply, and no photo attachment. The vocabulary available for describing another driver is one the company wrote and publishes, which means it contains no slurs and no accusations of crime. Replies and image uploads were both considered and rejected before launch.
Plates identify vehicles rather than people. Jerk Alert performs no owner lookups, holds no DMV or commercial identity data, and never displays a poster's phone number. Reports can be flagged by anyone; enough flags from different people remove a report from public view automatically, pending human review within 5 business days. Authors can delete their own reports at any time, and deleted reports are erased permanently after 30 days.
Reports accumulate into an Erk Score, a running rating for each plate. Good driving counts too: an Award is a positive report that pulls a plate's score down, and a Friendly Heads Up is a non-judgemental nudge about a broken light or expired tags that never moves the score. The app renders all 51 US plate designs natively.
Jerk Alert is built by Jerk Alert LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company. The app is free, carries no advertising, has no in-app purchases and contains no advertising SDKs. It is rated 18 and over. The Android app is distributed on Google Play; the iOS app is in App Store review.
One-line descriptions
- Tagline: Alert the jerk. Stay safe. Move on.
- Descriptor: A structured record of driving behavior, by license plate.
- Positioning line: Your driving isn't anonymous any more.
Fact sheet
| Product | Jerk Alert |
|---|---|
| Company | Jerk Alert LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company |
| Founded | 2026 |
| Headquarters | Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA |
| Platform | Android (Google Play). iOS (App Store) — build 1.4 submitted, in review. |
| Current version | 1.4 on both platforms |
| Package / bundle ID | org.jerkalert.app on both platforms |
| Price | Free. No advertising, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions. |
| Age rating | 18+ |
| Website | jerkalert.org |
| Launch | October 13, 2026 |
| Google Play | play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jerkalert.app — public from launch day |
| App Store | Link published here on approval |
| Sign-in | Phone number, one-time code. One person, one voice. No email, no password, no social login. |
| Report contents | Plate + state, curated location, 1 of 25 categories, severity 1–5. No free text, no photos. |
| Erk Score | 0.0–5.0 per plate. Weighted: five zero-level reports are folded into every plate's average, so one bad day cannot brand a driver. Verified reporters count four times as much as unverified ones. |
| Posting limits | At most three Alerts on any one plate, ever, per member |
| Moderation | Flag on every report; auto-hide once 6 separate networks have flagged it (several accounts on one Wi-Fi count once), and the whole report hides; human review within 5 business days, priority to harassment and safety claims |
| Retention | Deleted reports erased permanently after 30 days |
| Plate rendering | All 51 US plate designs, rendered natively in-app |
The story, if you want an angle
Three that hold up to scrutiny:
- The app with no comment section. Built in an era where every social product ships a text field and then spends years moderating it, Jerk Alert removed the field instead. The design argument is that the harassment lives in the free text, not the structured data.
- Public roads, public record. A restaurant is rated by strangers. A driver, doing something in full public view that affects everyone around them, is not. Jerk Alert asks why.
- Solo build. The whole product — app, API, website, and a rendering engine that reproduces all 51 US license plate designs from a calibrated per-state table — was built by one person.
Please don't write that we do these — we don't
- Owner lookups. Jerk Alert cannot tell you who owns a plate. No DMV access, no commercial identity databases.
- Photo uploads. There has never been one in the product.
- Public records aggregation. Every report is submitted by a driver who saw it happen. Nothing is scraped or purchased.
- Location tracking. Location is optional, approximate, foreground-only, and never attached to a report.
Full detail on the safety design: jerkalert.org/safety
Brand assets
Free to use in coverage of Jerk Alert. Please don't recolour or stretch the mark.
512×512 PNG
Screenshots
Six phone frames, 1080×1920 PNG, as submitted to Google Play. Plates in frames 1–5 are deliberately obscured; frame 6 shows the company's own vanity plate, JRKALRT.
1 · The WatchLive feed of recent alerts
2 · Post an AlertPlate, place, category, level
3 · Alerts Near MeMap of nearby reports
4 · Post an AwardGood driving on the record
5 · Plate recordErk Meter, endorse, flag
6 · Plate profileClean record, two awards
Need something specific — a founder headshot, a plate render, a higher-resolution mark, iPhone-sized screenshots? Email support@jerkalert.org.
Founder
Ned Winter is the founder of Jerk Alert. Winter has always been a dreamer. This project is an attempt to reconcile his love of his fellow human beings with the confusing experience of driving with them. He works from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is available for interviews, podcasts, and on-record debate about public driving records.
Usage
- Write the name as Jerk Alert — two words, both capitalised. Not "JerkAlert".
- The company is Jerk Alert LLC.
- The domain is jerkalert.org, not .com.
- A plate's rating is its Erk Score (the number); the five triangles that display it are the Erk Meter.
- A report is an Alert. Positive reports are Awards. The vehicle-condition nudge is a Friendly Heads Up.
- The feed of recent alerts is The Watch.
Safety & Accountability · Privacy Policy · Terms · support@jerkalert.org