Pocket Atlas — privacy policy

The short version

Pocket Atlas records where you walked so it can give you stickers for it. Your walks are private by default. Your photographs stay on your phone unless you share them. We do not sell anything to anyone, we do not carry advertising or third-party analytics, and you can take everything with you or delete all of it from inside the app.

Who we are

Pocket Atlas is made by Savvas Pythakakis. Contact: savvas.pyth@gmail.com. We are the data controller for everything described here.

What is stored, and where

On your phone, always, and this is the copy that matters:

• your stickers — which landmarks you collected, when, and the coordinates at the moment of collection
• your walks, including a route recorded while a walk is running
• your photographs, at the size your camera took them
• your trophies, quest progress and XP

On our servers, in Frankfurt, so the passport survives a lost phone:

• the same stickers, walks and trophies
• your photographs, in private storage that only your account can read
• a handle, if you choose one, and who you follow
• first-finder claims, which have to be server-side because they are a race

Location

Location is the whole app. It is used to notice you have arrived somewhere and to record the walk you are on. Two things about it are deliberate:

• The passive layer stores no routes. Between walks, Pocket Atlas uses only significant-location changes and visits, on your device, to notice you are near something worth a nudge. It does not keep a trace of where you went.
• Shared routes are coarsened by about 40 metres, and detailed routes are simplified after a period. A walk you share should show the shape of the day, not your front door.

We store accuracy and speed alongside each sticker. That is used to tell a real arrival from a spoofed one before a leaderboard counts it, and for nothing else.

Photographs

Your photograph is the sticker. It is stored on your phone and uploaded to private storage tied to your account. Nobody else can read it unless you share a walk that contains it. We do not analyse the contents of your photographs and we do not use them to train anything.

What we do not do

• No advertising, ever.
• No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.
• No selling or sharing of personal data with anyone.
• No global leaderboard of named people — the only worldwide number is your own percentile.
• We will not identify a person from a photograph, for you or for anyone else.

Signing in

You do not need an account. The app signs you in anonymously at first launch so your passport can back itself up. Signing in with Google links that anonymous identity to you — it does not replace it, and nothing collected beforehand is lost. Google tells us your email address and your account identifier, and nothing else; we never receive your Google password. We ask only when something needs a name that other people can see — adding a friend, or claiming a handle — and never before.

Other people's data

Landmark names, coordinates and descriptions come from Wikidata (CC0), OpenStreetMap (ODbL) and Wikimedia Commons, each credited in the app. Nothing about you goes back to them.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you may see, correct, export or delete your data, and object to how it is handled. Three of those are buttons in Settings rather than a request you have to make:

• Export produces two files: a document you can read, and an archive containing everything, photographs included.
• Delete removes your stickers, photographs, walks and trophies from the phone and from our servers. Landmarks you found first become unclaimed again. There is no thirty-day window and no soft delete.
• For anything else, or to complain to a supervisory authority, contact us first and we will answer.

Children

Pocket Atlas is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.

How long things are kept

Until you delete them. There is no automatic expiry, because a passport whose early pages vanished would not be a passport. Detailed walk routes are the one exception: they are simplified after a period, since the exact line adds nothing once the walk is over and its precision is the part worth losing.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, the app will say so rather than quietly updating a web page.