Privacy Policy
Atlas of Us (atlasof.us web app and iOS app) · Effective 2026-09-24
In short: we collect only what the service needs, ship no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs, never sell data, and you can delete your account and all content from inside the app at any time.
What we collect
- Account: email address (to sign in and receive login codes); an optional display name (defaults to the part of your email before "@"); if you set a password, only a salted PBKDF2 hash is stored; login codes are stored only as hashes, expire after 10 minutes and are deleted once used. If you use Sign in with Apple on the web, we receive the identifier and email Apple provides (which may be an Apple private relay address).
- Memories you create: place (coordinates and name), date, text, photos and videos.
- Photos are resized and re-encoded on your device before upload, which strips embedded EXIF metadata including GPS. Reading a photo's capture location and date happens only on your device, to pre-fill the memory.
- Videos are uploaded as original files and may contain metadata written by the recording device (such as location).
- We do not collect contacts or advertising identifiers.
- Website statistics: the atlasof.us website (not the app) uses our own anonymous page statistics — pages viewed, referrer, city-level location inferred from the network, and device type. No cookies, no stored IP addresses, never linked to your account.
- Abuse prevention: to stop automated requests for login codes, we briefly keep a one-way hash of the requesting IP address (salted with a key that changes daily, so it cannot be turned back into an IP or linked across days). It is deleted automatically within 24 hours.
How we use it
Only to provide the service: storing your memories, syncing them among members of the same map, and sending login codes. We do not sell data, use it for advertising, or build profiles.
Who can see it
- Your memories (photos, videos, text) are visible only to members of the map you share — people you invited with an invite code.
- Public heatmap: coordinates of all memories contribute to a site-wide heatmap in anonymous form, rounded to a grid of roughly 10 km. It contains no photos, text, place names, names or account information, and cannot reveal a precise location.
Third-party services
These process data only as needed to provide their function, under protection equivalent to this policy:
- Cloudflare (hosting, D1 database, R2 file storage) — stores all account and memory data.
- Cloudflare Email Sending / Brevo — send login-code emails (Cloudflare primarily, Brevo as backup) and receive your email address.
- Maps and address search — CARTO / OpenStreetMap serve map tiles (they see your IP address and the area you view); OpenStreetMap Nominatim and AMap (Gaode) provide address search and reverse geocoding (they receive the search text or coordinates you look up).
- jsDelivr, Google Fonts — deliver open-source libraries and fonts; they see your IP address.
- Apple — only when you use Sign in with Apple on the web.
Retention and deletion
- Your data is kept until you delete it.
- Deleting a memory removes it and its photos and videos from the database and file storage.
- Deleting your account: open the menu (top right) and tap "删除账号" (Delete account). This immediately deletes your account, all memories you created with their photos and videos, and your login-code records. Maps you own that have other members are transferred to the earliest-joined member; maps with no other members are deleted entirely.
- Automatic database backups (Cloudflare D1 Time Travel, always on and not configurable) may retain historical snapshots of deleted data for up to 30 days, after which they expire. We will not restore data you have deleted from them.
- Revoking consent / requesting deletion: delete your account in the app at any time, or email us and we will help.
Children
The service is not directed to children under 13.
Contact
[email protected] · Operated by Qi (Travis) Zhang, Vancouver, Canada. If this policy changes, the effective date above will be updated.