Privacy policy

• • No user account: you never need to sign up or sign in.
• • No tracking cookies and no trackers, on the site or in the app. The website uses anonymous, cookie-free audience measurement (Vercel Web Analytics): page views and totals, no identifier, no cross-site tracking.
• • No advertising, and no data sold or shared for advertising. Nothing you do in the app is used to target anything.
• • No profile: we do not know who you are, and we do not try to find out.

Only two things leave your phone, and only if you ask them to: a question put to James, and a photo you choose to send. Both are described below.

The app's map is ours: we draw the DROTe official 2023 orthophoto, the relief, the trails and the places ourselves, from archives we host. There is no Google Maps in the app any more since our own map, and no Google Places. Downloading an area for offline use copies those archives onto your phone and sends nothing. This version does, however, still embed the Google Maps SDK: it starts when the app launches and may send Google technical and usage data (identifiers, interactions, crash and performance data), although no Google map is shown; it will be removed in a coming version.

If you allow it, your location is used only to show you on the map, on your device. The app never stores or transmits it: today's data is requested for fixed island coordinates, and no request carries where you are. You can refuse or revoke that permission at any time; the map still works.

When you ask James a question, the question, the six previous turns on screen, the island, the language and a random install code go to our own service on Cloudflare. That service builds the answer from what the app publishes and has it written by a model from Anthropic, which receives the question and the conversation for that.

• • No account, no name, no location. The install code is drawn at random on your phone; it only counts your twenty questions a day, and our service keeps just a re-hash of it, renewed daily, for thirty-six hours.
• • The question is kept for 180 days, with no identifier, no IP address and not the answer, so that we can see what visitors look for and what the app does not know.
• • No advertising use, and nothing is used to recognise you from one visit to the next.
• • You can turn James off in Settings; the app then calls nothing at all.

The site's Share page and the app's "Send a photo" button let you send us your photos and videos of the island. Nothing leaves unless you choose it: you pick the files, you say where it was if you want to, you leave your Instagram handle if you want the credit, and you tick the permission to publish.

• • The files go straight into our own storage (Cloudflare R2), as they are; they are not published automatically.
• • A photo often carries the place and time it was taken in its metadata. We read those in your browser to offer you the place, and the file is sent as it is; if that bothers you, strip the metadata before sending.
• • We look at every submission one by one. If we publish yours, your handle is credited. Write to us to have it taken down at any time.

Version 1.0.0 sends no notification and never asks for that permission: the Alerts section of Settings does not exist in this version. The day it does, this page will say so first.

Your favourites, the chosen language, the map type, the downloaded areas and the last of today's data are stored on your device only (Hive, shared_preferences). They are never transmitted; you can erase them from Settings › Reset, and they go if you delete the app.

To work, the site and the app rely on a few services:

• • islands-api (ours) — today's data, weather, sea, trails and events, are plain public files read for fixed island coordinates; the request carries no identifier, no position and no parameter.
• • Cloudflare — hosts our map archives, our photo storage and the James service.
• • Anthropic — writes James's answer from what our service gives it.
• • Vercel — hosts the site and measures its audience anonymously and without cookies.
• • External links — Instagram pages, operator and institution websites and itineraries open in Safari or in the corresponding app, outside the app; they are governed by their own privacy policies.

When you use these services your IP address may be visible to the provider concerned, as with any Internet connection.

Data controller: Carl De Oliveira.

For any question about this policy, to ask for a photo to be taken down or for anything about you to be erased, write to hello@exploremadeira.app.