Privacy policy

Nookfar is published by Filip Racki, an individual developer established in Poland. He is the controller of the personal information this policy describes, in the sense of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and the person in charge of the protection of personal information, in the sense of Quebec’s privacy law.

Contact: nookfar@rackidev.com. Personal information reaches the developer only when you choose to send it: an email to this address, or something else you choose to send, such as an App Store review. Separately, if you agreed in your device’s settings to share analytics with app developers, Apple gives every developer crash reports and usage statistics about their own apps, aggregated or otherwise in a form that does not identify you (Apple’s explanation). You can turn that off at any time, under Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → Share With App Developers.

Your photos. With your permission, Nookfar reads the dates and locations saved in your photos to match each photo to the trips in your travel history, which is how it shows the countries and regions you have visited. Opening a place’s or a region’s photos also reads where each photo was taken, to show the ones taken there. If you turn on trip suggestions (Settings → Trip Discovery → Suggest Trips from Photos), it also reads them to suggest trips; they are off until you turn them on, and nothing is saved until you accept a suggestion. Nookfar shows the photos themselves in its gallery. If you choose to favorite or delete a photo from inside Nookfar, it does that in your photo library. The app never copies a photo on its own; choosing Share makes a temporary copy to hand to wherever you send it, and Nookfar deletes that copy once the share is done, or at the latest the next time it opens.

Your steps and walking distance. With your permission, Nookfar asks the Health app for two numbers — step count, and walking and running distance — for the dates of a trip, and shows them on that trip’s screen. These numbers are fetched fresh each time you open the trip, only displayed on screen, and never stored by Nookfar — not on your device and not anywhere else. This feature exists on iPhone and iPad only. How Nookfar handles these two readings, and nothing else, is also set out in a separate Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy, which has its own page.

Your location. With your permission, Nookfar shows where you are as a dot on the map. Your position is not saved and is never added to your travel history, and the picture of the map Nookfar keeps to open on is never one that shows the dot.

You can withdraw any of these permissions at any time in your device’s Settings; Nookfar stops reading from then on.

Your App Store region. Whenever the map perspective or the starting place has not been set — on first launch, and after you erase all travel data — Nookfar checks which App Store region your device is signed into, and uses it to pick the map perspective for contested borders and where the globe first opens. You can change either in Settings at any time. With no App Store account, the perspective is the default one, “Widest international agreement”, and your device’s region setting picks where the globe opens.

Your age range, where a law requires it. Some US states have laws that require apps to check the age range that the app store or the device holds for the person using them. On each launch, Nookfar asks your device’s system whether such a law applies to you; only where it does, Nookfar asks Apple for your age range: whether you are 18 or older, or which younger age group you are in. The answer is used only to follow that law. It is never stored and never reaches the developer.

On your device: your trips with their notes, the places you lived, the places you added yourself, your settings, and the map perspective you chose. This is derived from your photos and from what you enter, and it stays in the app’s own storage on the device. If that storage cannot be opened — a damaged file, or one a newer version wrote — Nookfar sets it aside on the device rather than deleting it, so nothing is lost; Settings → Data → Set-Aside Data lists these copies.

Beside these, the app keeps working copies it can make again, also on your device:

Photo descriptions for VoiceOver. When VoiceOver or another accessibility feature reads a photo, Apple’s Vision framework describes it, on the device: what it recognizes in it, and how many people. Nookfar keeps each description so it is not made twice, and removes it once the photo is no longer in your library, or no longer among the photos you let Nookfar read.

Other caches. From your photos: which place each trip photo was taken at, the last scan behind trip suggestions, a blurred impression of each photo, and which photos were already checked for a copy in iCloud Photos and have none, so they are not checked again for a week. From your trips: the names and regions of their places, the lines your routes follow, and your visited places as the map draws them, including the picture of the map it opens on. From your settings: a copy of your perspective choices as this version last read them, so it still has something to show if a newer version of Nookfar ever saves them in a form this one cannot read. From the app’s own data: the list of places you can search for, and the letter shapes the map’s names are drawn with.

Nookfar never sends any of these anywhere. Settings → Data → Stored on This Device lists them, grouped by what they are for, and can clear each group; the app makes them again when they are needed. Erase All Travel Data clears them all.

Your device’s own backup, such as iCloud Backup, includes your trips, places, settings and any set-aside copies, as it does any app’s data; with iCloud Backup on, Apple holds that copy. The caches are left out: the ones slow to rebuild are marked to be excluded from backups, and the rest are kept in the system’s cache folder, which iPhone and iPad backups and Time Machine on a Mac skip.

The app sends nothing to the developer, and makes no request of its own to any server. The whole world map, and the list of places you can search for, is built into the app; a place the list does not have is one you type in yourself, under Settings → Your Places, and it is stored on your device like any other.

Three things involve Apple’s services, the same way they do in any app: a photo kept only in iCloud is fetched from Apple when the app needs it (to show it, to share it, or to describe it for VoiceOver); the App Store region check above asks Apple’s App Store when the perspective or the starting place has not been set; and the age-range check above asks your device’s system whether an age law applies and, where one does, asks Apple for your age range. Nothing else about you goes with any of them. Apple’s privacy policy covers what Apple does with these requests.

Settings → Data → Export All Data writes your travel history — your trips with their stops, their notes and the journeys between them, the places you lived, places (the ones you added included, with their coordinates), the photos you added to or took out of each trip (named as your photo library and iCloud Photos name them, with when each was taken), the suggestions you dismissed, and any territory rules you wrote — to a plain text file. The file is readable by anyone who has it, in any text editor, because it is meant to be a backup you own, and one you can take to another device. It is written only when you ask, to the place you choose, and never anywhere else. The file contains no photos, no health readings and no settings.

Settings → Data → Erase All Travel Data removes from Nookfar every trip, place and setting, the set-aside copies, the caches and any temporary copies made for sharing or exporting. Your photos are untouched. On iPhone and iPad, deleting the app removes everything else. On a Mac, deleting the app leaves what it stored on the Mac: erase it first with Erase All Travel Data.

No advertising. No tracking. No accounts. No third-party analytics. No selling of personal information, and no sharing of it for advertising; apart from Apple and Zoho, for the reasons this policy gives, no one receives any. No other company can collect information about what you do across apps or websites through Nookfar. Nookfar analyzes the dates and places in your photos only on your device, and only to build your travel history; it never uses them, or anything else about you, for advertising, to score you, or to make decisions about you. Neither the app nor the developer collects, uses or sells personal data to train large language models.

Because the app tracks no one and sells nothing, a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal from your browser or device changes nothing: there is no tracking or sale for it to turn off.

When you write to nookfar@rackidev.com, the developer receives your email address, your name if your email shows it, and whatever you write or attach.

Why. Only to answer you, and to fix what you report. The legal basis is the developer’s legitimate interest in answering the people who write to him (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)). Writing is up to you: if you don’t, the only consequence is that the developer cannot answer you.

Who holds your emails. The mailbox is hosted by Zoho Corporation B.V., in Zoho’s data centers in the European Union, which store the emails on the developer’s behalf. In rare cases, Zoho’s support staff in India may access them, under the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. No one else receives them.

How long. Up to 12 months after the last message in a conversation; then the whole conversation is deleted. Keeping it that long lets a problem reported twice be matched to the first report.

Support emails are held in the European Union, and may be reached from India as described above. For readers in Quebec: your emails are therefore communicated outside Quebec. Nothing else about you leaves your device for the developer.

Apart from an email you send, or anything else you choose to send, such as an App Store review, no personal information reaches the developer. Everything the app keeps is on your own device, and every right you have over it is exercised there, with the export and erase controls above.

If you have written to the developer, you can ask at the same address for access to your emails and a copy of them, for them to be corrected or deleted, or for their use to be restricted. You can also object at any time to the developer keeping your emails for his legitimate interest; on request, he explains how he weighed that interest against yours. You will have an answer within one month, and within 30 days in Quebec. If you have a question, a complaint, or believe this policy is not being kept, write to the address at the top.

If the developer refuses a request, the answer gives the reasons, and you can appeal by replying to it: you will have a written answer, with its reasons, within 60 days. If the appeal is refused, the answer says how to complain to your state’s attorney general, where your state provides for it, or to one of the authorities below.

You may also complain to a data protection authority: in the European Union, in the country where you live, where you work, or where you believe the infringement took place. The developer is established in Poland, where the supervisory authority is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Danych Osobowych, UODO, https://uodo.gov.pl/en), which takes complaints in Polish; in France, for example, it is the CNIL. In Quebec, you may ask the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (https://www.cai.gouv.qc.ca) to examine a refusal within 30 days of it, or complain to it. Elsewhere in Canada, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and in Australia the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Nookfar is not directed at children. Nothing the app reads, on anyone’s device, ever reaches the developer.

This version of the policy is effective from 8 October 2026. Any change to it moves that date and the one at the top. If the app ever changes what it reads, stores or sends, this policy changes in the same release, and that release’s notes, which the App Store shows, say so. The app will not start sending data anywhere under a policy that says it does not, and where a change needs your consent, it asks for it first.