Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Detour stores about you, why, where, for how long, and what you can do about it. It covers the Detour iOS app, its App Clip, and the getdetour.app website and service behind them. The short version: the trips you plan are stored on our servers under an account the app creates for you, you can erase all of it from Settings at any time, and we never sell your data or use it for advertising.

1. Who we are and how to reach us

The controller for the data described here is Marius Kažemėkaitis, an individual trader in Lithuania who makes Detour.

Postal address: Upės g. 1, Laumėnai, Kauno r., LT-53178, Lithuania. Phone: +370 618 83181.

For any question or request about your data, write to privacy@getdetour.app. We answer data requests within one month.

2. The account that exists before you sign in

Detour creates an anonymous account for you the first time the app launches, before you have signed in or done anything else. This is what lets your trips be backed up on our servers and restored if you reinstall the app. The account is bound to your phone: its key lives in the phone's Keychain and survives deleting the app on that same phone. It carries no name and no real email address; in place of an email it holds a made-up address that no mailbox receives.

Sign in with Apple is optional. When you sign in, Apple's identity is attached to that same account rather than creating a new one, so the trips you planned before signing in stay with you and can follow you to a new phone.

If you sign out (Settings, Account & backup, Sign out), the signed-in account and its trips stay on our servers for you to sign back into. Your phone keeps its trips and backs them up again under a new anonymous account, so for a time our servers hold both copies.

Our lawful basis for creating the account and storing your trips is performance of the contract with you: storing trips is the service, and there is no way to keep a trip for you without an account to keep it under. Our lawful basis for abuse prevention (App Attest, DeviceCheck, rate limits, server logs), for product analytics and for counting visits to the website from those server logs is our legitimate interest in keeping the service running and understanding how it is used. You can object to any of them under section 9.

3. What we collect

Your trips. Each trip's title, dates and whether it is archived; for each stop its name, address (street, postcode, town, region and country), coordinates, Apple's place id and category; for each leg the route line, its distance and duration and anything it could not avoid; and the trip's route preferences. Stops are precise places, and a trip can reveal where you live and when you are away, so we treat trips as personal data in every part of this policy.
The traveler account. An account id and a session token generated by us, with the short description of the app and phone that the app sends with its requests (its user agent), kept with the session. The App Attest key id that ties the account to a genuine copy of the app on your phone, and an attestation record of that key (its public key and a counter, with no account attached).
Apple identity, only when you sign in. The identifier Apple assigns to you for Detour, the name you chose to share, the email address, whether that address is a Hide My Email relay address, and the sign-in tokens Apple issues, which we keep so we can revoke the sign-in when you delete your account. When Apple tells us about a change to your Apple account (you stopped using Sign in with Apple with Detour, deleted your Apple account, or changed email forwarding), we record that notice against Apple's identifier so it is acted on once.
Your subscription, only when you buy Detour Pro. The App Store's records of that subscription: the plan, its purchase, renewal, expiry and refund dates, the transaction numbers Apple assigns to it, and the price, currency and storefront Apple reports for each charge. They are linked to the traveler account so that every install you prove it on gets Pro. Apple takes the payment: we never see your card, your Apple Account or your billing details.
Server logs. Your IP address and request metadata (the address requested, the time, the outcome, the response size) for each request the app or a browser makes. The address requested can contain a trip's id or a shared link's code. The log records our own code writes carry no trip contents, names, emails or tokens. A copy of those records goes to PostHog in the EU, without the App Attest key id.
Product analytics. Events describing what the app did (for example that a route was fetched or a trip was opened) and their outcome, sent to PostHog in the EU. Each event carries a random install id that the analytics library creates on your phone, and the app version, phone model, iOS version, language, time zone, screen size and connection type. PostHog receives your IP address with each request, as any server does, and is set to discard it rather than store it. Events carry no account id, no name, no email, no trip id, no place and no search text. Purchase events say which plan was chosen and whether a free trial started, with no price.

Your location and the points you send. The app reads your location to show it on the map and to sort search results near you. A search can carry the visible map area, your position or the line of your trip, so results are ranked by distance or by how far off your route they are. Naming a point (when you pick a spot on the map or use your current location as a start) sends that exact point to find its name. Build me a trip sends the exact start and finish you choose, which can be your home, with the dates, your time zone, how far you like to drive and what you stop for. These points go to our servers and, for search and naming a point, on to Apple. They answer the request, are not stored with your account, and are not part of any trip unless you add them to one.

We also keep counts of how often places in an area are planned or opened, by map square and day, with nothing about who planned or opened them. They tell us where to look for new places worth a stop.

4. Place photos

The photos of a place are found through Google image search (using Serper) and on Wikimedia Commons. We store the address of each photo and of the page it was found on, never a copy of the photo itself. Each photo shows a credit that links to that page.

Your phone loads each photo directly from the site it was found on, or from the image host that site uses, so that host receives your IP address and a request for the image, as it would if you visited the site yourself. The app sends no referrer with the request. Like a browser, the app keeps a temporary cache on your phone of the photos it has loaded. Shared trip pages load photos the same way, without a referrer.

A rights holder who wants a photo removed can follow the notice process in our Terms of Use.

6. The website

The getdetour.app website sets no cookies for visitors and loads no analytics script. Its pages are served by Vercel, whose server logs are described in section 3. We use those logs to count visits to the website's home, Support, Privacy and Terms pages: totals by page, country, referring site and browser type. This reads nothing from your device beyond the request your browser sends to load the page, and stores nothing on it. Shared trip pages load Apple's map (MapKit JS) from Apple, so your browser contacts Apple to draw it, and load place photos from the sites they were found on, as section 4 explains.

7. Processors and regions

We do not sell your data. The following services process it on our behalf, under their data processing terms, for the purposes listed:

Vercel: hosting, the content delivery network, server logs and the AI Gateway. Our functions run in Frankfurt (fra1).
Neon: the database that stores accounts and trips. Frankfurt (eu-central-1).
Upstash: short-lived rate-limit counters, some keyed by IP address and some by account id, and the attestation record of each install's key, which has no account attached and no expiry. Frankfurt, Germany.
PostHog: product analytics and a copy of our server log records, EU hosting.
Apple: payments and subscriptions through the App Store and its notices about them; Sign in with Apple and its notices about your Apple account; App Attest and DeviceCheck, which tell us a request comes from a genuine copy of the app; the maps, search, place details and point names the app is built on, drive time estimates worked out on your phone, the map snapshots in shared trip previews, and the map on shared trip pages (MapKit JS); and weather, for which Apple receives a point rounded to about 10 km, never your account.
Hetzner: hosting for Detour's own routing server, in Germany, which calculates every route from OpenStreetMap data. It receives the coordinates of the places a route runs between, never your account.
Grafana Cloud: numbers about the routing server's health, EU hosting. No personal data.
Serper: Google image search for place photos and Google web search for facts about places. It receives a place's name, category, town and country, never your account or your location.
Wikimedia Foundation: Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, to identify places, check the facts in their descriptions and find photos. It receives place names and coordinates, never your account.
Vercel AI Gateway with models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google: place descriptions, which Detour writes with AI from public sources and labels as such in the app, finding places worth a stop, and the names of trips Detour Pro builds for you. For descriptions and discovery the models receive place names, coordinates and public facts about the places. To name a built trip they receive the names, towns and categories of its stops, the towns it starts and ends in and how many days it spans. Never your account or your exact location. Our operational traces at Vercel can keep the requests about places, to help us fix problems.

When you hand a stop to Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze, that app receives the destination and its own privacy policy applies.

Our database of accounts and trips is in the EU. While a trip is shared, its public view is also cached by Vercel's network close to the people who open it. Where a service above processes data outside the EU or EEA, the transfer rests on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or on an adequacy decision.

8. Retention

Accounts and trips stay for as long as you use Detour. An anonymous account that has not been used for 24 months is erased together with its trips, because we have no way to warn you first. An account linked to an Apple identity that has not been used for 36 months is erased together with its trips.
Deleted data leaves the live database at once and leaves database backups within 6 hours.
Subscription records are unlinked from your account when the account is deleted. The record of the subscription stays, with no account attached, because Apple keeps sending us its renewals and refunds. Once the subscription has ended for 90 days the record is deleted, and its history of charges is kept for our accounts with nothing that identifies you or the subscription.
Server logs are kept by Vercel for 30 days, and their copy at PostHog for 14 days.
Analytics events are kept by PostHog for 1 year, with the random install id but no account.

A few things outlive a deleted account:

An Apple revocation token. If Apple cannot be reached at the moment you delete your account, the deletion still completes and we keep only the token that revokes the Apple sign-in, with no account, name, email or trip attached to it. We retry the revocation for up to 30 days, then delete the token whether or not it succeeded.
The attestation record of your phone's key, which has no account attached and no expiry.
Analytics events already sent, with their install id (and, from versions of the app before the public launch, a trip id), for the analytics retention above.
The anonymised history of a subscription's charges, described above.
Apple's notice that you stopped using Sign in with Apple, if you did that from your Apple account settings before deleting: the notice stays, with Apple's identifier and no account, so it is never applied twice.

9. Your rights

You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to how it is processed, to receive it in a portable form, to withdraw any consent you have given, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Some of these you can exercise directly in the app:

Erase everything: Settings, Account & backup, Delete account. This deletes the account, every trip on our servers and on the phone, and your backup, and revokes the Apple sign-in if there is one.
Leave the signed-in account: Settings, Account & backup, Sign out, as section 2 describes.
Take your trips with you: export any trip with two or more stops as a GPX file from the trip menu.
Anything else, including a copy of your account data, access to server logs and objection to analytics: write to privacy@getdetour.app.

You can complain to the State Data Protection Inspectorate of Lithuania (Valstybinė duomenų apsaugos inspekcija), at https://vdai.lrv.lt/en/, or to the data protection authority in your country of residence at any time. We would still like to hear from you first.

10. Children

Detour is made for planning road trips and is not directed at children. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to privacy@getdetour.app and we will delete it.

11. Passing on your phone

Because the account is bound to the phone and survives deleting the app, a phone passed on without being erased can restore your account and trips for its next owner. Erase the phone (Settings, General, Transfer or Reset iPhone) before selling it or giving it away, or delete your Detour account first from Settings.

12. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we change the date at the top and say so on this page. The app always links to the current version. Our Terms of Use describe the service itself.

Read also our Terms of Use, or go back to Detour.