Privacy Policy

Odysia is a travel journal. You log the places you have been, and the app turns them into a map, a calendar, and a yearly review you can share.

This policy explains what the app collects, why, and what control you have over it. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.

What we collect

Your account

When you sign in, we store an account record so your trips can follow you between devices.

• If you sign in with email, we store your email address. We send a one-time code to it to confirm it is yours. We do not use it for marketing.
• If you sign in with Apple, we receive whatever Apple chooses to share. If you use Apple’s Hide My Email, we only ever see the private relay address Apple generates, never your real one.
• If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, your name and your Google profile picture — the basic profile, and nothing more. We never see your Google password: the sign-in happens in your device’s own browser, not inside Odysia. We do not read your Google account for anything else, and we have no access to your Gmail, contacts, Google Calendar or Google Drive. (The calendar and file imports described below read your phone’s calendar and a file you hand over. Neither reaches into your Google account, and neither is connected to signing in.)

Signing in with Apple or Google tells that company that you use Odysia. It does not tell them anything about your trips.

Your profile

• Username and display name
• Profile photo, if you add one
• Your home base — the city and country you set, not a device location
• Your visibility setting (who can see your trips)

Your trips

For each trip you log:

• Country, city, and country code
• The latitude and longitude of that city, taken from a built-in list of world cities — not measured from your phone
• Start and end dates
• How you travelled (flight, train, car, boat)
• Whether it was a stay, a day trip, or somewhere you passed through
• Any itinerary notes you write
• Whether you have hidden it from your profile

Connections and social activity

If you use the social features: your connections with other users, the meet-up suggestions, congratulations, reactions and wishlist joins you send, and any blocks or reports you make. Reports are reviewed so we can act on them.

Adding a city from somebody’s wishlist tells them so. If you open a city on a friend’s wishlist and tap Join, they are sent a message naming that city and you — that is the point of the button, and it is the only thing in the app that tells somebody you looked at something of theirs. Taking a city back off your own wishlist tells nobody.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store a push token for that device — an identifier issued by Apple or Google that lets us deliver a notification. It is not tied to anything else about your phone, and you can revoke it at any time in your device settings.

Bringing in trips you have already taken (all optional)

Typing in years of travel is nobody’s idea of an evening, so Odysia can work it out from things you already have. There are five ways, under Settings → Import trips, and you have to choose to run each one.

Four promises hold for every one of them:

• It is read on your phone, and the file or library itself is never uploaded. What is saved is a trip — a city, its country, and the dates — the same as if you had typed it in.
• The coordinates saved are the city’s, from a built-in list of world cities, never a coordinate measured from your phone or taken out of the file. So somewhere you have been that is not a trip — your home, your office — never has its address stored anywhere.
• You see every trip it found before anything is added, and days your calendar already covers are left alone.
• You can undo an import, and it removes exactly what it added, leaving anything you have edited since.

From your photos. Odysia reads two things from your photo library: when each photo was taken, and where, if your camera saved that inside the photo. It reads a handful of photos per day rather than all of them. It never reads, copies or uploads the pictures themselves — only the date and place recorded alongside them. (Photos you choose to attach to a trip are a separate thing; see below.)

From your calendar. With your permission, Odysia looks through your phone’s calendar for flights, trains, ferries and hotel bookings — the ones your email adds for you — over the last three years and the year ahead. It reads every calendar on the phone except birthdays, which includes a Google or Outlook account you have connected to iOS. It takes the place and the dates out of events that look like travel; everything else in your calendar is ignored and none of it is uploaded. Odysia never writes to your calendar, and never changes an event.

From a flight log. A file you export from a flight-tracking app such as Flighty. Read on your phone, and nothing in it is uploaded.

From your Google Maps saved places. A Google Takeout export of the places you have saved. Read on your phone and never uploaded; the places land in each city’s Itinerary & Recommendations, which is shown to the same people your privacy setting allows to see your trips.

From your Google Maps Timeline. A file you export from Google Maps, holding the places Google recorded you stopping at and for how long. This is the most sensitive file Odysia will ever be handed — it is every address, not only the interesting ones — so it gets the shortest life. It is read in memory, reduced to a list of cities and dates, and dropped. Odysia does not keep the file, does not copy it anywhere, and does not upload any part of it. Only visits are read; the movement between them is ignored. Nothing in it is sent to Google or to anyone else — your phone does not contact Google at all to read it, because the file is already on the phone.

Whether to hand Odysia a Timeline export at all is a real decision, and we would rather you made it knowingly: it describes your life in far more detail than your travel. Everything the app keeps afterwards is the same list of cities and dates the other four imports produce.

Photos you add to a trip

You can attach up to four photos to any trip. Unlike the import above, these pictures are uploaded — that is the point of them, so they are still there when you sign in on a new phone.

• Who sees them is the setting you already chose. Settings → “Who can see my trips” governs these photos exactly as it governs the trips themselves: connections only, connections and friends of friends, or anyone. Change it and the photos follow immediately.
• Someone you have blocked cannot see them, and neither can anyone you have not shared that trip with.
• They are kept in your own folder and opened through a short-lived link. Links for your own photos last a week so the app can cache them; links for someone else’s last an hour and are never written to that person’s device — so removing access actually removes it.
• You can report a photo. Anyone who can see one can report it from the photo itself, with a reason. We review reports and remove anything that breaks the rules within 24 hours.
• Odysia shrinks each photo before uploading it, which also removes the camera data attached to it, including any GPS coordinate. So a photo’s location never leaves your phone, even when the photo does.
• Remove a photo, or delete the trip it belongs to, and the file is deleted too. Delete your account and all of them go with it.

On Android this needs the media location permission, which is what lets an app see the place stored in a photo. That is the only location permission Odysia has ever asked for, and it is only used for this.

How the app is used

To know whether Odysia is any good — and, more often, to find out which part of it is broken — we count the actions people take in it. Things like:

• the app was opened, and which tab was tapped
• a trip was added, edited or deleted, and where it came from (typed in, or one of the imports)
• an import ran, and how many trips it found
• the map, the calendar, Wrapped or a Journey video was shared
• a connection request was sent or accepted
• a notification was tapped

Each is recorded against a random number generated for your installation, not your account, your email, or your device’s identifiers.

What is counted is the action, never the content. Adding a trip to Lisbon records that a trip was added and that it came from the calendar — not Lisbon, not the dates, not the people you were with. Searching Friends records how many results came back, never what you typed. Writing an answer to a prompt records which prompt, and how long the answer was, never a word of it.

We keep a small profile against that same random number: how many countries, cities, trips and connections the installation has, and whether a home base and a photo are set. Counts, not places.

There is no automatic screen or tap capture. Every event is one we wrote down deliberately, and the full list is published in the project’s tracking plan.

Stored on your device

The app keeps a local copy of your trips and your preferences so it works offline and starts instantly. This lives on your phone and is removed when you delete the app.

What we do not collect

• Where you are. There is no GPS in the app and it never asks for your live location. The only places a coordinate can come from are ones you hand over: a photo you took, or a file you chose to import — and in both cases what is stored is the matched city from the built-in list, never the coordinate itself.
• Your contacts or your microphone.
• Your calendar, except what you ask for. The optional calendar import above reads your phone’s calendar to find travel bookings, and only when you run it. Nothing from your calendar is uploaded, nothing is written back to it, and the app has no access to it at any other time.
• Any file you import. The flight log, saved places and Timeline files are read on your phone and discarded. Odysia keeps no copy of any of them.
• The content of your photo library. Odysia can save Wrapped slides to your photos, and — if you run the optional import above — read the date and place recorded alongside them; it does not look at, copy, or upload those pictures. The only pictures that leave your phone are the ones you deliberately attach to a trip, which go to your own storage and are shown only to the people your privacy setting allows.
• Advertising identifiers. There are none, because there are no ads.
• Any record of which places you added or shared. The usage counts above are events, not content.

Odysia does not use your camera, and does not ask for access to it.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. Odysia relies on a small number of services to function:

Only the first four ever receive anything that identifies you. Mixpanel receives an event name, a handful of counts, and a random installation number. Sentry receives a description of a crash or a failed save and the kind of phone it happened on, never your account, your trips, or anything you typed. The rest receive nothing but a request for a public file or a public lookup. None of them are sent your account, your trips, or who you are.

As with any internet request, every provider above can see the IP address the request came from. That is how the internet works rather than something Odysia chooses to send them.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect the safety of our users.

Other people’s trips

If you connect with other travellers, they can see what your visibility setting allows. If you share a Wrapped slide, a map image, or a journey video, that image contains whatever was on screen — you are choosing to publish it, and we have no control over where it goes afterwards.

How long we keep it

We keep your data for as long as your account exists.

Deleting your account deletes it. Go to Settings and tap Delete account. This removes your profile, your trips, your connections, and your push tokens from our systems. It cannot be undone.

Removing the app from your phone deletes the local copy but does not delete your account — use Delete account first if that is what you want.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it, or object to how it is used.

Deletion is built into the app. To receive a copy of your data, email us from the address you signed up with and we will send it to you within 30 days. For anything else, email us and we will respond.

Children

Odysia is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

International transfer

Odysia is available to travellers everywhere, and our service providers may process data in a country other than yours, including the United States. We use providers who offer appropriate safeguards for that transfer.

Security

Data is transmitted over encrypted connections and access is restricted so that you can only reach your own data and whatever other users have chosen to share with you. No system is perfectly secure, but we take this seriously.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we will update the date at the top and note the change in the app.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: iakpan@moodbe.com

Moodbe LLC