Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

Your account:

• Your mobile number, to sign you in with a one-time code. It is never shown to other travellers.
• Your name, username and password (the password is stored only as a one-way hash).
• Your email address, if you give one. A confirmed email is needed to contribute information about places.
• Your profile photo, a short description, your home district, your language, and, if you give them, your gender and year of birth (only the year, never the full date), your passport country, country of residence and home currency.

What you write and add:

• Posts, comments, reactions, questions and answers about places, photos, and the edits and new places you send as a contributor.
• Trips: their name, dates, places or cities, budget, plan, packing list, members, expenses and settlements, and the messages of the trip’s group chat, with any photos sent in it (where a photo was taken is removed from it before it is kept).
• The places you save for later (the heart on a place). Only you see this list.
• Check-ins at places, your travel map, badges and points.
• Food Passport cards you make, with the foods you chose and the photo you added.
• Reports you send about content or people, and blocks.

Verification (optional):

• To become a verified traveller you record a short selfie video. A member of our staff looks at it and decides. The video is deleted the moment the decision is made. We keep only the result, how it was verified, who reviewed it and when, and the link to your Facebook profile if you chose to give one, which only our staff can see.
• We never ask travellers for a national ID card or a passport, and we store neither their images nor their numbers.

Guides:

• If you apply to be listed as a professional guide, we ask for the number of an identity document and a copy of it. This is kept so that we can meet our legal duties and answer a lawful request from law enforcement about an incident. It is stored encrypted in private storage, is never shown publicly, and can be opened only by senior staff; every time it is opened is recorded.

Location:

• When you check in, your phone’s position is read once to confirm that you are at the place. It is not shown to anyone.
• When you say you are back home from a trip, your position may be read once to confirm it. It is not kept.
• When you ask for posts “near me”, your position is read once, rounded to about a kilometre and used to find places near you. It is not kept.
• Location data (GPS) is removed from every photo before it is shown publicly. For a photo sent as evidence with a contribution, the position is read on our server first and kept with that contribution only, for our moderators.
• Live location within a trip group is shared only if you switch it on, only with that group, and stops by itself when the trip ends.

The trip assistant:

• The questions you put to the trip assistant, and what it made of them, are kept with your account so that our staff can improve its answers.

Technical data:

• Your IP address and basic details of your browser or device, in our server logs and for limits that protect the service from abuse.
• Cookies that keep you signed in and protect your session. We use no advertising cookies.
• If you allow notifications, a token that lets us send them to your device.
• Records of errors in the app, so that we can fix them.
• Which pages of the public site are opened (see “Others who process data for us”). No name, phone number or account id is given with it.

2. Why we use it

• To provide the service: signing you in, your trips and expenses, the places database, the feed, chat, notifications, points and rewards.
• To keep travellers safe: verification, reports, moderation, limits against abuse, and automatic checks of messages for requests for money and similar risks.
• To match verified travellers who want a companion (see the next section).
• To answer your questions in the trip assistant.
• To deliver a reward you earned.
• To understand which parts of the site are used, and to fix faults.
• To meet our legal duties.

We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

3. What other travellers can see

• Your public profile: name, username, photo, description, badges, level, and the posts you made public. You can keep your profile to your followers only.
• Your posts, comments and contributions, with your name, where they are shown.
• A check-in photo is shown on a place’s page only if you tick the box that says so.
• Members of a trip see that trip: its plan, expenses, chat and members.
• You can stay off the leaderboards in your settings.

Companion matching is for verified travellers of the same gender who are 18 or older. Nobody’s real name or photo is shown to a match unless that person chose to show it: sending a request shows the sender to the person asked, and accepting a request shows the accepter to the sender, each after confirming. Until then a match sees only an alias. Phone numbers and other contact details are shared only when both have revealed themselves and both have shared a contact card. We never show the exact number or the identities of travellers with matching plans.

Your mobile number is never shown to other travellers.

4. Others who process data for us

We use a small number of service providers. Each receives only what its job needs:

• Hosting and delivery of the site, and storage of photos and files (cloud server and content-delivery providers).
• An SMS gateway, which receives your mobile number to deliver the sign-in code.
• An email service, which receives your email address to deliver our messages to you.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google), to deliver notifications you allowed.
• An error-reporting service (Sentry), which receives technical details of a fault.
• Google Analytics, which is told which pages of the public site are opened. Addresses are cleaned first (no search words, no private links), and no name, phone number or account id is given to it.

The trip assistant uses two outside services:

• Anthropic (the Claude model). When our own word lists cannot read a question you asked the assistant, its text is sent to Anthropic to be read, after phone numbers and email addresses have been taken out. To word a remark about a budget, only a draft made of figures we worked out is sent: nothing you wrote goes with it. The model supplies no price and no fact.
• SerpApi. Flight and hotel prices are looked up there by route, city and date. Nothing about you is sent.

Some of these providers process data outside Bangladesh.

We may disclose data when the law requires it, for example in answer to a lawful request from a court or law enforcement.

5. How long we keep it

• Verification video: deleted when the decision is made.
• A guide’s identity document: while the guide is listed, and for three years after the account is deleted or the application is rejected and not used again; then deleted.
• Companion chats: deleted 30 days after the chat has expired, unless a report about it is still open.
• Trip group chats: the group may write for 30 days after the trip ends; messages, and the photos sent with them, are deleted 30 days after the chat closes.
• Removed posts and comments: deleted for good after 30 days, or later while a report about them is open.
• Notifications: 90 days.
• Delivery details for a reward: 60 days after delivery.
• Records of what our staff did (audit log): two years.
• Live location: only the latest position while it is switched on; cleared when it ends.
• Everything else: while your account exists.

6. Deleting your account and your data

You can download your own data in Settings ("Download my data"): one file with your profile, your trips and your own expenses, your check-ins, posts and contributions. It is made when you ask, once a day at most, and no copy of it is kept by us.

You can delete your account in Settings. Your personal data is then deleted for good within 24 hours.

• Information you contributed about places (prices, permits, descriptions) stays, because other travellers rely on it, but it no longer carries your name.
• Your comments are emptied; a comment that others replied to stays as an empty place so their replies still make sense.
• A trip you organised is handed to another member, or deleted if there is none.
• A guide’s identity document is kept for three years, as said above.

You can also correct most of your data yourself in Settings, and ask us for a copy of it or for anything else about it at the address below.

7. Your choices

• Notifications: choose which you get, by push and by email, in Settings.
• Profile: public, or for your followers only.
• Leaderboards: stay off them.
• Location: your phone asks before it is read, each time it matters; you can refuse, and the feature works without it where it can.
• Verification and companion matching are optional.

8. Security

Connections to the site are encrypted. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes. Sensitive documents are stored encrypted in private storage. Access by our staff is limited by role, needs two-factor sign-in, and is recorded. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach that affects you, we will tell you.

9. Children

Companion matching and similar features are for people aged 18 or older only. Because we store only the year of birth, someone who turns 18 during the current year is treated as under 18 until the following year.

[For the lawyer: state the minimum age for holding an account at all, and how a parent can ask for a child’s account to be deleted.]

10. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we change the date at the top. If a change matters to how your data is used, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

11. Contact

[registered name of the operator], [postal address]. Email: [contact email].

[For the lawyer: the law that governs this policy, and any regulator a traveller may complain to.]