Privacy Policy for kierie

In short

kierie shows cards about the place where you stand. To do that it needs to know where you are, but that knowledge stays on your phone. The only thing the app asks for over the internet is the file of cards for your area, by the area's name.

What kierie does not do

• We do NOT ask you to make an account or sign in
• We do NOT send your location, coordinates or route to anyone
• We do NOT use analytics, tracking or advertising tools
• We do NOT use device IDs or push-notification tokens
• We do NOT sell or share any data with third parties
• We do NOT let other users post anything, so nothing about you is shown to others

Your location

With your permission, the app reads your location from the phone to choose which cards to show and how far away things are. This happens on your phone only.

• The app works out which area you are in. An area is a hexagon of about five square kilometres, from a public grid (H3).
• It then asks for the card files of that area, the areas around it and your wider region. The request names the areas, nothing finer.
• Everyone in the same area gets exactly the same files. The server cannot tell where in the area you are.

What reaches our servers

The card files are stored in Google Cloud (Firebase Storage, servers in the Netherlands). When your phone downloads a file, that server sees what any web server sees: your IP address, the name of the file (your area) and the time. We do not combine or keep this to follow anyone.

To make sure only the real kierie app downloads the files, the app uses Firebase App Check. Your phone asks Apple (App Attest) or Google (Play Integrity) to confirm it is a genuine copy of the app. That check is about the app, not about you, and it carries no location.

Some cards show an archive photo, for example of your street in 1904. These photos are copied to our own storage first, so your phone never asks Wikimedia or anyone else about the street you are looking at.

Stored on your phone

• Your settings: language, topics, which kinds of card are on or off
• Cards you save
• Drawings for the cards, downloaded once; card files are only kept in memory while the app runs
• If you turn on notifications: the last place the app showed cards for, and which notices it already sent

None of this is sent anywhere. Deleting the app deletes it.

Notifications

Notifications for weather warnings and rain are off until you turn them on. When they are on, your phone checks the file for its own region now and then, in the background, and decides on the phone whether to notify you. There is no push service and no token that identifies your phone.

Directions

Some cards have a Directions button. It opens your phone's own maps app with the spot's coordinates. What happens then is up to that app (Apple Maps or Google Maps).

Children

kierie has no accounts, no messaging and no user posts, so children cannot be contacted through it and nothing they do is shown to others.

Your rights (GDPR)

kierie keeps no personal data about you on our side, so there is nothing to look up, correct or delete there. Everything the app knows about you is on your phone, and you can remove it by deleting the app.

Changes

If this changes, we update this page and the date at the top. Any feature that would send more than an area name would be stated here first.

Questions about privacy? hello@blauwtoffie.nl