What we keep, and what we cannot.
Where you go is one of the most revealing things your phone knows. Most of what follows is not a promise we are asking you to trust — it is how the app is built. Your position and the road ahead reach our server with each request, and we do not keep them: unless you send us a drive or plan a route, no coordinates of yours are stored on our side. What we do keep still says roughly where you have been, and this page says how.
Last reviewed 3 October 2026. Guideling is in private beta; this statement describes the beta service.
The short version
- Your exact location is not saved by us. When the app asks what is on the road ahead, your position is used to answer the question and then thrown away. There are two exceptions: a drive you send with feedback, which we keep for 90 days, and a route you plan, which we keep for six hours while its stories are prepared.
- Reports about what you heard contain no coordinates and no area. Each names the story, the time and your speed, and for a story that starts, how far before its place it began — so, like the list below, it says where you were when you heard it. The part of our server that receives them rejects anything it does not expect, so a future version of the app could not start sending your position by accident.
- You do not need an account. The anonymous label your phone uses is a random ID it made up. It is never your Apple ID or anything taken from the hardware. It stays the same when you delete and reinstall the app, and it can move to a new phone set up from a backup of this one, so your use of the app over time can be tied together under it.
- The list of places you have heard about is kept on our server, under that label. It is what counts your free stories and keeps them from resetting when you reinstall; your phone's own copy is what stops the app telling you the same thing twice. No position is stored with it — but a list of places you were told about, over months, says roughly where you have been, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. Your phone also keeps its own count of the free stories used, which deleting the app does not erase (below).
- Your phone keeps your last five drives, and only you can send one. They stay on the phone, out of its backups, so that you can attach one to feedback. Nothing is sent unless you press Send, and turning off Record drives deletes them. The app also keeps a short log of every trip on the phone, which nothing deletes (below).
- Nothing is written about you. The same story about a castle goes to everyone who drives past it, so there is no profile of you to build in the first place.
Who is responsible
The data controller — the company responsible for everything this page describes — is Late Nights, MB, a small partnership (mažoji bendrija) registered in the Register of Legal Entities of the Republic of Lithuania.
- Company code: 307304521
- Registered address: Kazio Ulvydo g. 11-182, LT-08355 Vilnius, Lithuania
- For everything, data protection included: hello@guideling.app
We are established in the European Union, so there is no separate EU representative.
Everything the app sends to us, in full
This is every request the app makes to our server, what it carries, and what we keep. What your phone sends to Apple and others directly is further down.
| Request | What it carries | What is kept | For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asking what is ahead | Your position, the road ahead, your speed and direction, your language, the topics you picked, the places you have already heard about and the kinds of place you heard most recently, and the trip's ID | The area you were in, about 5 km² — roughly a small town — with the time, your speed, and which stories were offered and how far along the road ahead each one was. No coordinates, but a place and the distance to it say quite closely where you were. | No end date yet (below) |
| Starting and ending a trip | Your phone's anonymous ID, your account if you signed in, your language and the app's version; at the end, how long the trip took, how far it went and how long the app talked | All of it | No end date yet |
| What you heard | Which stories were played, which were skipped or rated, and where it chose to stay quiet, with the time, your speed and, for a story that starts, how far before its place it began. No coordinates. | All of it | No end date yet |
| The places you have heard about | Nothing extra: it is written from the report above | Your phone's ID, your account if you signed in, each place, and when you first heard about it | No end date |
| Planning a route | The road Apple worked out for it — from the start, usually where you are, to the end, through any stops you add — with Apple's estimate of how long it takes and its turn instructions, your language and the topics you picked, and the trip's ID | The route, with nothing to say whose it is, while its stories are prepared | 6 hours |
| Fetching stories and recordings | Which places' stories or recordings, your language, and for stories the trip's ID | Only the log entry (below) | As the logs |
| Checking your pass | Your phone's ID, and your account if you signed in | Only the log entry | As the logs |
| Question (paid) | What you say, as sound, from the tap until the guide answers, with your position, speed and direction, the places around you, the places you have already heard about, your destination if you set one, the conversation so far, your phone's ID, your account if you signed in, and the trip's ID (below) | Only how long you spoke and what answering cost, under your phone's ID — not the recording, not the words, not the answer | The cost record: no end date |
| Buying or restoring a pass | Apple's signed record of the purchase, your phone's ID, and your account if you signed in | Which pass, Apple's transaction number, when it was bought, started and ends, how many questions it has answered, and whose it is | No end date |
| Signing in (older beta versions only) | Apple's proof of who you are, and your email address if Apple shares it. The app no longer offers it | A scrambled form of your Apple ID, the email address if shared, Apple's token for ending the sign-in, and when you first and last signed in | Until you delete it |
| Feedback (only when you press Send) | Your note, the stars you gave a trip if you rated one, and your phone's ID — and, only if one was attached when you pressed Send, one recorded drive: your precise position through the drive, with the time, and what the app considered and said along the way | All of it | 90 days |
One more record is kept by our accounts rather than by any request. When your trip is the first to need a story that does not exist yet — on the road, when you tap a place, or along a route you plan — or you ask a question, we record what writing the story or answering the question cost (for a question, how long you spoke), which place it was for, and which trip, phone or account it was for. It is how we know what the service costs to run, and it has no end date. It holds no position, but like the list of places you have heard about, it says roughly where a trip went, and for a planned route, where it was going.
If you type in a destination, that is more revealing than anything else here — it says where you intend to be, not just where you are. Apple works out the road to it, and the road the app then sends us ends there, so it tells us the same thing. We use the road to collect stories along it, keep it for at most six hours while that happens, and then delete it. The cost records above outlast it: the places along the route that needed a story stay recorded against your trip.
Drives recorded on your phone
The app records each drive on your phone, so that when something goes wrong you can show us the drive it went wrong on. This is on unless you turn it off.
- It keeps your last five drives and deletes older ones. They are stored where your phone's iCloud and computer backups do not reach, and nothing sends them anywhere on its own.
- Turning off Record drives in Settings deletes every drive kept, and nothing more is recorded until you turn it back on.
- In Settings → Feedback each drive is named by where it began and ended, such as Vilnius – Kaunas. To get those names your phone sends Apple the first and last position of each drive once, when the list is shown, and remembers the answer. The names are kept in the app's settings, which, unlike the drives, are part of your phone's backups.
- A drive leaves your phone only if it is attached to feedback when you press Send: one drive at most. In Settings → Feedback none is attached unless you pick it. When a trip of ten minutes or more ends, the app may ask you to rate it; if you give it three stars or fewer, that trip's drive is sent with your rating, and the form says so above Send. With Record drives off there is no drive to send.
Separately, the app writes a short log of every trip into its own files on your phone: the time of each story it told and of each one it decided against, what you tapped, the trip's ID, when feedback was sent, and the words of any question you asked, though not the answer. Nothing sends these logs to us. Nothing deletes them either: turning off Record drives does not remove them, they are part of your phone's backups, and they can be copied off the phone with Finder or the Files app. Deleting the app deletes them.
A drive you send is a precise, timestamped record of where you went and what the app was doing along the way. We use it to find out why the app said what it said, or stayed quiet, and we delete it after 90 days.
The app also keeps one number on your phone: how many of the free stories it has used. One copy is in the app's settings, which are part of your phone's backups. Another is in the phone's keychain, and that one is not deleted with the app, so deleting and reinstalling the app does not start the free stories again; it is not synced to iCloud, does not move to a new phone, and is removed when the phone is erased. The app never sends this number to us — our server keeps its own count, from the list of places you have heard about.
What your phone sends to others
Some of what the app does is done by your phone talking to somebody other than us. None of it passes through our server.
- The map is Apple's. Your phone fetches the map of wherever it is showing from Apple.
- Search and directions. What you type into the destination field goes to Apple as you type, with the area around you so that the suggestions are nearby. Every route you plan is worked out by Apple from its start, its end and any stops you add, however you chose them; if you ask the guide to take you somewhere it does not already know, your phone looks the name up with Apple too. The road Apple returns is what the app then sends us, as described above.
- Naming your drives. The first and last position of each recorded drive go to Apple, as described above.
- Paying. Every purchase is handled by Apple, and Restore asks Apple for your purchase history. You pay Apple, not us; the app passes us only Apple's signed record of each purchase. Deleting an account made with an older beta version asks you to confirm it with Sign in with Apple first.
- TestFlight. During the beta, Apple passes us the crash reports and any feedback you send through TestFlight.
- Pictures of places. When you open a place's card, your phone fetches its photograph and credit from Wikimedia Commons, which sees your phone's internet address and the name of the picture.
- Shared map links. If you give the app a short Google Maps or Apple Maps link, your phone opens it to see where it points, which is a request to Google or Apple.
- Directions in another map app. If you choose Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze under Go there, your phone opens that app — or its website, if the app is not installed — with the place’s position and, for Apple Maps, its name. Nothing about you goes with it. What that app does with it is under its own privacy policy.
Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation handle what your phone sends them under their own privacy policies.
Logs and backups
Our web server keeps an access log of every request to this site and to the app's server: the IP address it came from, the time, the address asked for, the other details the request carried — among them the app or browser version, the language and the page it came from — and the result. Some of the app's requests name the story being fetched, and some carry your phone's anonymous ID, your account or the trip's ID, so while an entry is kept it can show which places' stories a connection asked for, and when. The log is there to find faults and fend off abuse, and nothing else reads it. Old entries are deleted after about a week.
Three smaller logs hold the same kind of entry: the app server's own note of the IP address and address of each request from the app, which for a purchase also names Apple's transaction number and for some account problems the account; the background worker's note of which trip, or which tap, asked for which place's story; and the web server's note of errors and refused requests. They are erased whenever we update the program that writes them, and have no other time limit.
No log records your position.
A copy of the database is made every night and kept on the same server for about two weeks, so anything deleted from the database can remain in a backup for that long. One further copy of the list of places heard, made by hand on 22 September 2026 before a repair, is kept until we delete it.
If you have an account
The app no longer offers signing in. Beta versions made before October 2026 offered Apple's sign-in, never as something the app needed, and one still installed can still make an account. It was a trade made on purpose: you became recognisable to us across phones, so that your passes and your history could follow you to a new phone. The current app cannot sign in on a new phone, so a pass reaches one through Restore instead, from the Apple ID that bought it. An account stays until you delete it. While a phone holds one, the requests above carry it, and a pass bought on that phone is recorded against the account as well as the phone.
What we store is a scrambled version of the identifier Apple gives us, not the identifier itself. We check the sign-in against Apple directly rather than believing whatever the app tells us.
Signing in asks Apple for your email address. If you let Apple share it — which can be an address Apple makes up to forward mail to you — we store it with the account. Nothing sends mail to it. We also keep the token Apple issues, so that we can end the connection to Apple when you delete the account.
Deleting your account is done inside the app, in Settings → Account, which appears only on a phone that holds one. It deletes the account and takes its passes off your phone, and asks Apple to end the connection at the same time. Each pass's record — Apple's transaction number, when it was bought, when it ran and how many questions it used — stays with no account or phone attached, because it is the only proof that a pass was used: restoring purchases from the Apple ID that bought it brings back a pass you had not used, and not one you had. It is the one action that asks you to sign in again first, because it cannot be undone. What is filed under your phone's anonymous ID stays, and the list of places you have heard, and any cost records, keep the account's number, so they still show which phones were signed in to it; to have that deleted too, see your rights.
The beta waiting list
If you leave an address on this site, we store the address, the date, and which page it came from. That is the whole record.
Before anything else, we write once to check that the address is yours. That message contains a link and nothing else to do. Until you follow it, nothing further is ever sent — so somebody who types your address into the form cannot put you on a list you never asked to be on.
Once you have confirmed, it is used to send you at most two messages: one when there is a TestFlight build worth your time, and one when the app reaches the App Store. It is not a newsletter, it is not shared with anyone else, it is not passed to an advertising or analytics service, and there is no tracking pixel in it. The messages have no images, and nothing in them loads from anywhere when you open them — no picture, no font, no stylesheet — so opening one tells nobody anything. Each comes as plain text too, for a mail program that prefers it.
Every message carries a link that removes you, and you can also reply to any of them or write to hello@guideling.app. The record is deleted rather than marked — we do not keep a list of people who left. A confirmed address is deleted once the second message has gone. An address that is never confirmed is sent nothing more and sits unused until it is deleted; you can ask us to delete it at any time.
We do not run a mail server. The messages are sent through Hostinger, which hosts the hello@guideling.app mailbox and so sees the address and the message on the way through, in the European Union.
Who else sees your question
When you ask the app a question out loud, the sound of your voice leaves your phone. It goes to our server and straight on to Google, whose model listens, works out what you said, and answers in its own voice. That is the only part of the app that works this way. It starts when you tap Ask and stops as soon as the guide starts on its answer — or sooner, if it hears nothing for ten seconds or you tap again — and it never runs for more than a minute.
With your voice goes what the guide needs to answer: the name of the area you are in, how fast you are going and whether that is on foot, driving or on a motorway, the places around you with how far ahead or behind each one is and on which side, the story you last heard, the places you have already been told about, your destination if you set one, and the last few questions and answers of the conversation. If the guide looks up a place it was not given, it is told how far away that place is and in which direction. Your coordinates do not go to Google, but how far you are from the places around you does, and that says closely where you are. If the answer needs a web search, the search words the guide chooses and the country you are in go to Oxylabs, a company in Lithuania that runs the search and fetches the pages for us; your voice and your phone's ID do not. The pages it reads are kept, like every page the guide reads, with nothing to say who asked.
We keep none of the conversation: not the recording, not a written copy of what you said, not the answer — only how long you spoke, in the cost record. It passes through and it is gone. Your phone keeps the conversation until the app is closed, and writes the words of each question, though not the answer, into its trip log (above). Google is the only company your voice is sent to, and what it does with it is governed by Google's terms for the service we use.
Everything else the app says to you is written and recorded long before you set off, and is the same for everyone who drives that road. Asking is the one thing that happens live, and it is the one thing you have to press a button to start.
Why we use it
Each use rests on one of the grounds European data protection law allows (GDPR Article 6(1)).
| Purpose | What it uses | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| Telling you about what is ahead, not repeating a story, and counting your free stories | Your position (not kept), trip records, what you heard, the places you have heard about | Providing the service you asked for — Art. 6(1)(b) |
| A pass, an account, a planned route or a question, when you choose one | Purchase records, the account, the route, the question | Providing the service you asked for — Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Finding faults and making the stories better | What you heard, skipped and rated; rough areas; trip totals; cost records; crash reports | Our legitimate interest in an app that works and says the right things — Art. 6(1)(f) |
| Keeping the service secure and able to recover | Logs and backups | Our legitimate interest in a service that is not abused and not lost — Art. 6(1)(f) |
| Reading feedback you send, to answer it and improve the app | Your note, your rating of a trip, and a drive if one was attached | Your consent — Art. 6(1)(a) |
| The waiting list | Your email address | Your consent — Art. 6(1)(a) |
Where the ground is consent, you can withdraw it at any time: ask us to delete a note, a rating or a drive you sent, or leave the waiting list with the link in any message. Withdrawing does not undo what was done before. Where the ground is our legitimate interest, you can object, and we will stop unless we have a compelling reason that outweighs yours.
No law or contract requires you to give us any of this. The app cannot work without your position; everything else is needed only for the part it serves, and feedback, an account and the waiting list are optional.
How long each thing is kept
| Record | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your position, with each request | Not kept |
| Rough areas and the stories offered | No end date yet — see below |
| What you heard, skipped and rated | No end date yet — see below |
| Trip records | No end date yet — see below |
| The places you have heard about | No end date: it is what counts your free stories. Deleted when you ask |
| Passes | No end date: a pass you have not started does not expire, and a pass's record is never deleted. Deleting an account removes the account and the phone from its passes' records and keeps the rest: Apple's transaction number, when it was bought and ran, and the questions it used |
| An account | Until you delete it |
| Cost records | No end date |
| A planned route | 6 hours |
| The sound and words of a question | Not kept |
| A feedback note or trip rating, and a drive attached to it | 90 days |
| A waiting-list address | Until the second message has gone, you leave, or you ask |
| The web server's access log | About a week |
| The other three server logs | Until the program that writes them is next updated |
| Nightly copies of the database | About two weeks; one hand-made copy of the list of places heard, from 22 September 2026, until we delete it |
| Drives on your phone | The last five, until you turn off Record drives or delete the app |
| The trip logs on your phone | Every trip, until you delete the app |
| The count of free stories used, on your phone | In the app's settings, until you delete the app. In the keychain, until the phone is erased: deleting the app does not remove it |
Rough areas and the stories offered, and reports of what you heard, are meant to be deleted after 180 days, and trip records after 90. Nothing deletes them automatically yet. The oldest are from 15 September 2026, so the first trip records reach 90 days on 14 December 2026.
Who else receives it, and where
The service runs on a server in Lithuania, inside the European Union, rented from Hostinger. The database and its backups are on it. Beta builds of the app made before the service moved to guideling.app still send their requests to our development server, also in Vilnius, in a data centre run by UAB Cgates, which keeps its own database and logs of them.
Besides us, these receive personal data from the service or from the app:
- Hostinger, which provides the server, in Lithuania, and handles mail sent to and from hello@guideling.app, the waiting-list messages included.
- UAB Cgates, whose data centre holds the development server that older beta builds still use. Lithuania.
- Google, which hears and answers spoken questions. United States.
- Oxylabs, which runs the web searches an answer needs. Lithuania.
- Apple, for purchases, TestFlight and accounts made with Sign in with Apple, and — from your phone — the map, search, route planning and the names of your drives. United States.
- The Wikimedia Foundation, for the pictures of places your phone fetches from Wikimedia Commons. United States.
Apple, Google and the Wikimedia Foundation are based in the United States, so what reaches them may be handled outside the European Economic Area.
The stories themselves are written with the help of AI services outside the EU, working only from facts about a place — those requests contain nothing about you, because each story is written once for everybody rather than once for each traveller.
What we do not do
- No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
- No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDK in the app, and no analytics, tag manager, cookie or third-party request on this website. The fonts are served from this domain for that reason.
- No sale of personal data, and none of it is shared for advertising.
- No advertising or interest profile of you is built. The topics you pick in Settings travel with each request and are not stored.
- No cookies. This site sets none, and the app carries no session cookie.
- No decision about you is made by a machine. The app chooses which story to tell and when, which is the product, and nothing it decides has a legal or similar effect on you.
Children
The App Store rates Guideling 9+ — A10 in Brazil, ALL in Korea, 00+ in Vietnam — because some of its stories mention forts, battles and the weapons in them. It asks nobody's age, needs no account and never asks for a name, so it collects nothing more from a child than from anyone else. Feedback and the waiting list rest on consent, which Lithuanian law lets a person give for themselves from the age of 14; if you are younger, ask a parent before you send us either. A pass is bought through Apple, so a family's settings there, such as Ask to Buy, apply to it. If you think a child has sent us something, write to hello@guideling.app and we will delete it.
Your rights
Under European data protection law you have the right to see what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict how it is used, take it elsewhere, and object to how it is used. We reply within a month.
What we hold is filed under your phone's anonymous ID, which the app does not show. So the way to reach it is from the app:
- To see, take or delete everything filed under your phone's ID, write a note in Settings → Feedback saying so, with an email address if you want a reply, and press Send. The note carries the ID, which is how we find the records.
- If you have an account, deleting it in Settings → Account deletes the account at once and takes its passes off your phone; each pass's record stays, with no account or phone attached.
- To delete the drives on your phone, turn off Record drives.
- To leave the waiting list, use the link in any message.
For anything else, write to hello@guideling.app. A letter alone does not tell us which records are yours, so we may ask you to send a note from the app as well.
You may also complain to a data protection authority, in the country where you live or where you think the problem happened. Ours is the State Data Protection Inspectorate of Lithuania (Valstybinė duomenų apsaugos inspekcija), L. Sapiegos g. 17, LT-10312 Vilnius, vdai.lrv.lt.
Changes
If this statement changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top changes with it.