Whereabouts has no accounts, no sign-in and no cookies, and it never records what anyone looks up. It does count how the app is used, anonymously and in aggregate, so that I can see which areas people rely on and what is failing in the field. This page sets out precisely what that means.
Whereabouts is built from a fixed and public reference set of house names taken from published village maps, a latitude and longitude for each house, and the map drawings as images. Your phone downloads those files and searches them itself. What you type is never recorded, never sent anywhere and never shared.
Usage figures tell me which areas are actually being used, which is how I decide where to place houses next. The measurement is self-hosted on my own Cloudflare account rather than handed to an analytics company, and it is cookieless: nothing is written to your device to follow you, so there is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. A usage record holds which page or village map was opened, the site you arrived from on the first request only, the country reported by the network serving the site, whether the device is a phone or a desktop, and whether that request began a new visit.
It holds no IP address, no device or visitor identifier, and nothing about what was searched for. Since there is no identifier, the figures count visits and map openings rather than people, and one person’s visits cannot be joined up. Nothing is sold, shared or passed to advertisers, and there are no third-party trackers on any page.
The app is built to work with no signal, in places where nobody is going to stop and email me about a map that will not open. So when the app hits one of eight known problems it sends a short code naming which one, together with the app version, whether the device was online, a rough count and whether it is running on iOS, Android or neither. If there is no signal the report waits on the device and goes with the next one.
A report carries no free text, no error message, no stack trace, no house name and no search term. The collector that receives them accepts those eight codes and rejects anything else outright, and its code is published alongside the app, so this is enforced rather than promised.
The app is a set of static files served over a secure connection (HTTPS) from Cloudflare’s network. Nothing runs on a server while you search, and there is no database of users anywhere, so there is no store of personal data to breach and nothing for anyone to log in to. The source code is public, so anyone can check exactly what does and does not leave the phone. Once loaded, the app keeps working with no signal at all, which is the point in country where coverage drops but GPS carries on.
The village drawings are the work of Dr A Colin Day (colinday.co.uk), made freely available for copying and used here with his full support. Each drawing is shown in full with its own attribution. The house locations are original work, placed by hand from satellite imagery, and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. The software itself is open source under the MIT licence.
Every location is placed by hand, so one can occasionally be wrong, and some houses are still pinned only to the centre of their village. A house placed exactly shows a solid red ring; one not yet placed shows an amber dashed ring and sends directions to the village centre, so the two are never mistaken. Where a name appears more than once in a village, the app says so. Treat it as a strong guide rather than a guarantee and glance at the map before setting off. It is a navigation aid, not a substitute for local knowledge.
Anything on this page, and anything wrong in the data, is welcome at [email protected].