Privacy Policy — Footnote

Footnote records where you have been. That is a lot of trust to ask for, so this page tries to be specific rather than reassuring.

The short version

Your location history is stored on your iPhone and nowhere else. There is no account, no Footnote server, no sync service, and no analytics. The developer never receives your data and has no way to.

Two qualifications, both stated in full below: Footnote asks Apple's map service what city a coordinate belongs to, so coordinates do go to Apple; and your device backup, if you have one turned on, contains the Footnote database along with everything else.

What Footnote records

Footnote records continuously, including in the background when the app is not open. That is the point of it — a journal you have to remember to open would have holes in it. While tracking is active it stores:

GPS coordinates — both the smoothed coordinates drawn on the map and the raw, unfiltered pair reported by the GPS chip
Altitude, speed, compass heading, and horizontal and vertical accuracy
The timestamp of every recorded point
Whether a point is a stay, and how long that stay lasted
Motion activity — walking, running, cycling, driving, stationary or unknown — and the confidence iOS assigns to that classification
City visits: the city, state, country and time zone you were in, with the times you arrived and left
Any manual correction you make to how you travelled between two places
Internal tracking-tier records, used to tune battery use
Your chosen home city, including its coordinates, stored in app preferences rather than in the database

A point is only written after you have moved roughly 40 metres on foot, or 100 metres driving. A stationary phone records almost nothing.

Where it is stored

In a local database on your device, and in your app preferences for the home city. There is no Footnote server. There is no CloudKit or iCloud sync — the app has no iCloud container at all.

Device backups are the exception worth knowing. The database is not excluded from backup, so if you have iPhone backups switched on, your Footnote history is inside them, on the same terms as every other app's data. That is a backup of your phone, not a sync of your history — nothing is being uploaded on Footnote's behalf.

What leaves your device

Footnote makes no network requests of its own. It does use Apple's map services, which means some data reaches Apple. Specifically:

Reverse geocoding. To name the city you are in, Footnote sends a coordinate to Apple and receives a city, state, country and time zone. It does this at most once every ten minutes, and only after you have moved 500 metres.
City search. When you type in the home-city search field, what you type is sent to Apple's address search service as you type it.
Map tiles. Opening a map for a day or a city fetches tiles from Apple for the region shown.
Importing. Importing a Roam file looks up the places in that file, which sends them to Apple for geocoding too.

Apple's handling of these requests is governed by Apple's privacy policy, not this one. None of it goes to the developer, and none of it goes to any other company. Footnote contains no analytics frameworks, no advertising SDKs, no crash reporters, and no third-party code of any kind.

The one other way data leaves your phone is the one you initiate: exporting. The export is a plain, unencrypted JSON file containing your complete movement history, handed to the standard iOS share sheet — which can send it to Files, AirDrop, Mail, a messaging app, or a cloud service. Where it goes is entirely your choice, and you should treat the file the way you would treat a diary. Footnote deletes any leftover export file from its temporary folder the next time it launches.

How long it is kept

Until you delete it. Footnote has no retention limit and never prunes or expires old data — a trail from years ago stays exactly where it is unless you remove it.

Deleting your data

Everything — Settings, then Delete All Data. This permanently removes all routes, location points, city visits, tier records and travel-mode corrections, and clears your home city. It cannot be undone.
One city on one day — in the Journal tab, press and hold the city's name in that day's card and choose Delete. Only that day is removed; if the stay ran across several days, the others are kept. The city you are currently in cannot be deleted while the visit is still open.
The whole app — deleting Footnote from your phone removes its database with it, since none of it lives anywhere else.

If you have device backups turned on, a copy of your history may still exist in a backup taken before you deleted it. Removing that means removing or replacing the backup itself, which is outside the app's control.

Permissions Footnote asks for

Location. Footnote asks for "While Using the App" first, from a screen that explains what it does. Later it offers to upgrade to "Always", which is what allows the trail to continue while the app is closed. You can decline; the app still works, it just only records while it is on screen. You can change this at any time in iOS Settings. While Footnote is using your location in the background, iOS shows the blue indicator in your status bar.

Motion & Fitness. Used to tell walking from cycling from driving. This is processed on your device and is never transmitted.

Notifications. Footnote sends one local notification, if tracking appears to have stopped while you were away. It is generated on your device — there are no push notifications and no server that could send you one. You can turn it off in the app's Settings, or in iOS Settings.

Children

Footnote is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data from them. It has no accounts, no sign-up and no way to identify who is using it.

Your data, your rights

Because everything is on your device, the usual data rights are things you exercise directly rather than by asking anyone. You can see all of it in the app, take a full copy with the export feature, and delete any or all of it at any time. There is no copy held elsewhere for the developer to produce, correct or erase.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the version here will be updated and the date at the top will change with it. The same text appears inside the app, under Settings, and the two are kept in step.

Contact

Questions about this policy: privacy@myfootnot.es