Privacy Policy

Slowmad ("we", "us") operates the Slowmad mobile application and the website at slowmad.club. This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

Slowmad exists to show a small circle of friends roughly where each other will be. It is built to need as little about you as that goal allows.

Account information: the email address and name released to us when you sign in with Apple or with Google. You can change the display name at any time in the app.

Your plans: a place name, its approximate coordinates, the dates you gave, and any note you wrote. Coordinates are looked up from the place name you chose — the app has no access to your device's location and never asks for it.

Voice recordings: if you describe a trip by speaking, the recording is sent for transcription and is not stored. We keep only its length in milliseconds and the size of the model's response, so we can tell whether the feature is working.

Device token: an Apple push token, so a notification can reach your phone.

Your circle: who you are friends with, and the invitations you sent or accepted.

Crash reports: when the app crashes, a stack trace and the device model and OS version are sent to our own error tracker. These are not linked to your account and carry no personal information.

Walls: the text, photos, GIFs and attached plans you post on a person's profile wall or on a plan's wall, your replies, your reactions, and the @mentions in them. A photo is kept as you upload it, minus the metadata described under "Photos and Posts" below.

Notifications: a record that somebody commented, replied, mentioned you, reacted or followed you, kept so the in-app notifications screen can show it, and your three push switches (all pushes, social, friends).

Reports and blocks: when you report a person, a plan or a post, the note you wrote and what you pointed at; when you block someone, who.

Who sees what you post. A profile wall can be read and written to by every signed-in Slowmad user, friend or not. A plan's wall can be read and written to by whoever can read that plan. Blocking hides two people from each other's walls in both directions. Nothing on a wall is indexed by search engines, and the walls themselves can be read only by signed-in users; the one exception is a photo link, described below under Photos.

Photos. You can attach up to ten to a post. On our server every photo is rewritten before it is stored: the location, camera and time metadata (EXIF, GPS and the like) is removed, the picture is turned upright, and its colours are converted to sRGB. Only resized WebP copies are served to other people; the file you uploaded is not. The picture itself can still show a place — a street sign, a skyline — and that is yours to judge before you post it. Each resized copy has its own long, unguessable link. That link is not behind sign-in: it works for anybody who holds it, so a photo you post can be seen by whoever receives the link from somebody who could see it. Our links stop working the moment you delete the post, although a copy already open on somebody's screen, or held in a cache, can stay for a few minutes more; the files themselves are erased 30 days later (see the Posts paragraph below).

GIFs. A GIF is picked from Giphy, a third party (see "Third Parties"). When you post one we store its Giphy id and the addresses of its preview and animation, so everybody who opens the post sees the same GIF. Those files are loaded from Giphy's servers, which means Giphy can see the network address of every phone or browser that displays one.

Saving a photo. If you save somebody else's photo to your phone, Slowmad asks iOS for permission to add to your photo library. It is add-only: the app cannot read the photos you already have. Nothing about the save is sent to us.

Mentions. Writing @ and a person's name in a post tells them about it in their notifications.

To run the service: to show your plans to the friends you chose, and to work out where your routes cross theirs.

To reach you: notifications you turned on, and replies when you write to us.

To keep it working: crash reports and error logs, read to fix defects.

We do not advertise, we do not profile you, and we do not sell or share anything with a data broker.

To run the wall: to show your posts to the people described above, to tell people when somebody replied to them, mentioned them, reacted to what they wrote or followed them, and to deliver those as push notifications if you left them on.

Where the GDPR applies, we process your account and plans to perform the agreement you entered into by using Slowmad, and we process crash reports under our legitimate interest in a working application.

Your account and plans stay until you ask us to delete them. Voice recordings are never written to disk. Crash reports are kept for 90 days and then removed automatically.

Posts. When you delete a post, it disappears for everyone at once, together with the replies under it. The post and its photos are not wiped from our storage at that moment: we keep them for 30 days so that a report about them can still be reviewed, and then they are erased for good, along with the reactions and notifications that pointed at them. They go sooner if the account that wrote them is deleted, if the person or plan whose wall they sit on is deleted, or if you write to us and ask.

Deleting your account removes everything you wrote on walls (posts, replies and photo files), everything written on your own profile wall and on your plans' walls by other people, your reactions, your notifications and your push tokens. Reports you filed about other people stay with moderation, without your posts attached.

Notifications stay until you delete them in the app or delete your account.

Every post, like every person and plan, can be reported from the app. A report reaches us with the note you wrote and a pointer to the post; the person reported is not told who reported them. We read reports every day and act within 24 hours: removing the post, and ending the account behind it where that is the right answer.

To judge a report we may look at the post, its photos and its replies, including a post the author has already deleted. Blocking is yours alone: you and the other person stop seeing each other, and nobody is told.

Data is held on servers in the European Union, encrypted in transit. Access is limited to the person who operates the service.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Apple: sign-in, and delivery of push notifications.

Google: sign-in, if you choose it instead of Apple. We receive the email address and the name on your Google account, and nothing else.

OpenAI: transcription of a voice recording into a plan, and — when you ask the app to change plans you already have — the place names and dates of those plans, sent as context so that what you say can be matched against them. Neither the recording nor the plans are retained by us.

GlitchTip, which we host ourselves: crash and error reports.

DigitalOcean and MinIO: hosting and file storage.

Giphy (a service of Giphy, Inc.): the GIF picker. On the website and in the Telegram Mini App the words you search for go to our server, which asks Giphy for matching GIFs; Giphy sees the search term and our server's address, not you. In the iOS app the picker is Giphy's own software development kit, and it talks to Giphy directly from your phone: Giphy receives what you type into the search, the GIF you choose, and technical details such as your network address and device type, under its own privacy policy at https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032872931. The kit ships its own privacy manifest declaring what it collects. We never send Giphy your name, email or account id. We do not store search terms.

Transcription and plan matching are performed by OpenAI, which may process the recording and the plan context outside the European Economic Area under the safeguards in its own terms. Giphy is based in the United States and may handle the search terms and requests described above there. Everything else stays on our servers in the EU.

You can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it — including a post or a photo you already deleted in the app. Write to the address below and we will act within 30 days.

If you are in the EEA or the UK you may also complain to your national data protection authority.

Slowmad is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.

We will update this page when the app changes what it collects, and the date at the top will say when. Continuing to use Slowmad after a change means you accept it.

Questions about this policy go to lapster.me@gmail.com