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Privacy Policy

AIGuide  ·  Last updated: October 5, 2026

Overview

AIGuide is an audio walking-tour app. It uses your device's location to find historical and cultural sites nearby and narrates their stories as you walk past them. This policy explains what data the app handles, where it goes, and the choices you have. It applies to AIGuide version 1.2 and later as distributed through the App Store.

In short: AIGuide has no accounts, no advertising, no third-party analytics and no tracking, and we do not sell data. Some data does leave your device so the app can work. Each flow is listed below.

Location

AIGuide asks for location access only while the app is in use. It does not request "Always" access; while a tour is running, it keeps using location with the screen locked (iOS shows the blue location indicator) so it can narrate sites you pass with the phone in your pocket, and it stops when you pause or end the tour. Your location is used on your device to find nearby sites, rank them, and decide when to start a narration. Parts of it are sent to these services:

1. OpenStreetMap Overpass API (overpass-api.de). When you are outside a city that AIGuide has curated, the app sends your current coordinates and a search radius (about 500 m) to find historic sites, monuments and museums near you.
2. Wikipedia API (en.wikipedia.org). To get a description of a nearby site, the app sends the site's coordinates, which are close to your own, together with the site name and article titles.
3. Apple reverse geocoding (CLGeocoder). Your coordinates are sent to Apple to find the name of the city you are in. Apple's privacy policy applies.
4. AIGuide content CDN (Amazon CloudFront). Curated city guides are downloaded as files. Your location is not sent, but like any web server, the CDN sees your IP address.

Your coordinates are not sent to Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Polly or RevenueCat.

AI Narration: Anthropic Claude and Amazon Polly

• Anthropic Claude. To create a narration, the app sends a text prompt that contains the site's name, its descriptive text (from Wikipedia or our curated guide), and walking context. The walking context covers your approximate distance to the site, a speed category (for example "walking"), which way the site lies relative to you (ahead, left and so on), and the names of other nearby sites. The prompt does not contain your coordinates. From version 1.3.1 the prompt goes to a small AIGuide function hosted on Netlify, which passes it to the Anthropic API and streams the narration back. With it the app sends the anonymous Cognito token described below; the function checks it so that only the app can use the service, and keeps a daily usage count against a one-way hash of the identity ID to prevent abuse. It does not store prompts or narrations. If that service is unavailable, and in earlier versions, the prompt goes to Claude on Amazon Bedrock instead. Under their commercial terms, neither Anthropic nor AWS uses these prompts or outputs to train models.
• Ask. When you type a question about a place, the question, the place's description and your earlier questions about that place in the same conversation are sent the same way as a narration prompt (the Netlify function, then the Anthropic API, or Amazon Bedrock as a fallback). Questions and answers are not stored by AIGuide and are not linked to you.
• Amazon Polly. The generated narration text is sent to Polly to be turned into speech. Only that text is sent.
• Amazon Cognito. To call these services, the app gets short-lived AWS credentials from an Amazon Cognito identity pool without a login. Cognito issues an anonymous identity ID for this. The app keeps this ID in memory only for the current app session. It is not tied to your name, Apple ID or any other identifier.

AWS requests go directly from your device to AWS (region us-east-1) over HTTPS. The only AIGuide server in the narration path is the Netlify function described above.

Web search enrichment (Tavily). Development builds can add web-search context from Tavily to narrations. This feature is not active in App Store builds, and they send no data to Tavily.

Subscriptions (aiGuide Pro)

AIGuide offers an optional auto-renewing subscription, aiGuide Pro, sold through Apple's App Store.

• Apple handles all payments. We never see your payment details or your Apple ID.
• RevenueCat (revenuecat.com) manages subscription status for us. The RevenueCat SDK creates a random anonymous app user ID on your device. It sends that ID to RevenueCat along with your App Store purchase history and receipts, plus basic app and device information such as app version, OS version, locale and storefront. RevenueCat uses this only to check whether you have Pro access and to restore purchases. We do not attach your name, email or any other identifier to it. RevenueCat's privacy policy applies to the data it processes.

Identifiers Stored on Your Device

• Install ID. The first time you launch AIGuide, it generates a random UUID and stores it on your device. The app uses it on your device to count your free-tier narrations each month; for that purpose it never leaves your device. It is also sent with any curation request you submit (see below). Deleting and reinstalling the app creates a new install ID.
• iCloud Key-Value Storage. If you are signed in to iCloud, AIGuide mirrors its monthly narration counter to your own iCloud account through Apple's iCloud Key-Value Storage. This stores the current month and the number of narrations used, so reinstalling does not reset the monthly limit. We cannot access your iCloud data. You can turn this off in iOS Settings under your Apple ID › iCloud.

Data Kept on Your Device

The following stays on your device unless you send it to us yourself:

• Sites you save (hearted) and saved walks.
• Monthly usage counters and app preferences.
• A cache of nearby sites that you have loaded, kept in the app's private storage for about 24 hours. It is indexed by a coarse (~1 km) location grid.
• Downloaded curated city guides.
• Crash and performance diagnostics. AIGuide receives Apple MetricKit reports (crashes, hangs, battery and performance data) and stores up to about 10 MB of them on your device. The app never uploads them. They are only sent if you choose to attach them to an email (see below). If you have enabled "Share With App Developers" in iOS Settings, Apple may also share crash reports with us through App Store Connect under Apple's terms.

Deleting the app removes all of this data from your device.

City Curation Requests

When you are in a city that AIGuide has not curated, you can ask us to add it. If you submit a request, the app sends the following to our endpoint, a Netlify serverless function at aiguide-privacy.netlify.app, which stores it in Amazon S3:

• the city name you entered and a slug guessed from it;
• the optional reason you typed;
• app version, build number and platform ("ios");
• your install ID (above) and the time you submitted.

The server adds the time it received the request and a salted one-way hash of your IP address, which is used to spot abuse. Your raw IP address is not stored. As with any web request, Netlify and AWS process your IP address to deliver the request. We use requests only to decide which cities to curate next. We keep them until they are no longer needed for that purpose. Please do not include personal information in the free-text field.

Feedback, Debug Logs and Narration Reports

The app offers "Send feedback", "Send debug logs" and "Report narration". Each one opens a pre-filled email in Apple Mail that you review and choose whether to send. Nothing is sent automatically. Depending on the option, the draft contains:

• app version, iOS version, device model, locale and device memory;
• for narration reports, the site name and its internal ID;
• for debug logs, the last hour of AIGuide's app logs, which may include site names and approximate coordinates, and up to five of the most recent MetricKit diagnostic files.

If you send the email, we receive your email address and the contents of the email. We use them only to respond to you and to fix problems, and we delete them when they are no longer needed.

What We Do Not Do

Service Providers

We use these providers to run AIGuide, each under its own privacy terms: Amazon Web Services (Bedrock, Polly, Cognito, S3, CloudFront), Anthropic (the Claude model, through the Anthropic API and Amazon Bedrock), RevenueCat, Netlify, the OpenStreetMap Overpass API, Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and Apple. Any network request, including a request for a site image, reveals your IP address to the server that receives it.

Children's Privacy

AIGuide is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, for example in a curation request or an email, contact us and we will delete it.

Your Choices and Rights

• You can turn off or limit location access at any time in iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services.
• You do not have to submit curation requests or send feedback emails.
• To ask us to delete a curation request or an email you sent, or to ask about any data we hold, email vlad.griguta@gmail.com. For a curation request, include the city name and the approximate date you submitted it so we can find it. Depending on where you live, you may have further rights, such as access, correction, deletion or objection. We will honor them for the limited data we hold.
• You can manage or cancel a subscription in your Apple ID settings (Settings › [your name] › Subscriptions).

Security

All network requests use HTTPS/TLS. AWS requests are signed on your device with short-lived credentials. The curation-request storage is write-only for the public endpoint.

Terms of Use

AIGuide, including the aiGuide Pro auto-renewing subscription, is provided under Apple's standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement (EULA).

Payment is charged to your Apple ID when you confirm the purchase. A subscription renews automatically unless you cancel it at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the end of the current period. You can manage or cancel your subscription in your App Store account settings.

AI-generated narrations can contain mistakes. Please check important facts, and stay aware of your surroundings while walking.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy as the app evolves. We will reflect changes in the "Last updated" date above, and we will note significant changes in the App Store release notes.

Contact

For privacy questions, data requests or concerns, contact: vlad.griguta@gmail.com