Explo
Privacy policy
Explo works without an account. Your map lives on your phone. If you sign in, we back up the list of countries you marked so it follows you to a new phone. We don't sell data, show ads or track you across apps. We count anonymously which screens, pages and countries get used, and you can switch that off in the app.
What stays on your phone
Every place you mark as visited, wanted or lived in, your visit counts and your settings are stored on your device. If you never sign in, none of it leaves your phone. Deleting the app deletes it.
If you sign in
Signing in is optional. You can use Sign in with Apple or Google. We use it only to back up and sync your passport between your devices.
- What we store: your account ID and the email address and name your provider shares with us (Apple lets you hide your email), plus, for each country you marked, its status (visited, want to go, lived), your visit count, your private note on it if you wrote one and when it last changed, the regions inside countries you marked (such as US states), and the trips you plan or log (their countries, dates, name, emoji and note). If you sign in with Google, we also show your Google profile picture inside the app.
- Where: a database run for us by Supabase. Each person's rows can only be read and changed by that person's own account.
- Why: backup and sync, nothing else. We don't use it for advertising, profiling or analytics, and we don't sell or share it.
Public page (optional)
If you choose, you can publish a page at explo.world/@yourname, for the link in a social profile. It is off until you press Publish, and you can turn it off at any time, which stops the link working. Anyone with the link can see the name you pick, the countries you marked as visited and, only if you switch them on, your want-to-go list and your past trips by month and year. It never shows exact dates, upcoming trips, notes, where you live or your email address. Search engines are asked not to index these pages. To report a page, use the link at the bottom of it or the email address below. Deleting your account removes your page.
Your map on the web (optional)
You can sign in on explo.world/my-map/ with the same Google account to see and edit your map in a browser. That page talks only to our database (Supabase), keeps you signed in in that browser until you sign out, and shows or changes only what you already saved in the app. We add no analytics or trackers to it, and the page is not indexed by search engines.
Visa alerts by email (optional)
On explo.world/alerts/ you can ask for an email when the visa rules for a passport change. You do not need an Explo account.
- What we store: your email address, the passport you chose, the countries you chose to watch (if any), the language of the page, when you signed up and confirmed, and when we last emailed you. Nothing else.
- Confirmation first: we send one email asking you to confirm. If you do not confirm within a week, the address is deleted. We send nothing before you confirm.
- Stopping: every email has a link to stop, and a one-click unsubscribe for your mail app. Stopping deletes your address and your choices straight away. You can also ask at the email address below.
- Where: the address and choices are kept in our database at Supabase and cannot be read with the app's keys; the emails are sent through an email delivery service (currently Resend). They are used for these emails only, never for advertising, and are not sold or shared.
- Where the rules come from: every hour we read the public “Visa requirements for… citizens” pages on Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0) and compare them with the last time. Those requests contain no personal data.
Deleting your data
In the app, open Passport, tap the account icon and choose Delete account. This removes your account, every place and trip we stored for you, and your public page, straight away. Data on your phone is removed when you delete the app. You can also ask us to delete your data at the email address below.
Services the app talks to
To show weather and public holidays for a country, the app asks two public services: Open-Meteo (a forecast for a point in that country) and Nager.Date (public holidays by country code and year). These requests contain no account details and no name or email. Like any web request, they are visible to those services together with your IP address.
Arrival notifications (optional)
This is off until you turn it on in the Account sheet. If you do, Explo asks for permission to send notifications and to use your location. It works out which country you are in on your phone, using a map that is built into the app, and when you arrive in a new country it sends you a notification with the entry rule for your passport, the currency and the plug type.
- Your location never leaves your phone. It is not sent to us, to Supabase, to Open-Meteo or to anyone else, and it is not used to look anything up online.
- No location history. Explo remembers only the last country it saw, so it can tell when you arrive in a new one. It does not keep a trail of where you have been.
- Notifications are created on your phone. They don't come from a server, and Explo does not collect a push token.
- Always or While Using. Choose "Always" for location if you want it to work while the app is closed. With "While Using", it says hello when you open the app.
- You stay in control. Turn it off in the Account sheet, or remove the permissions in iOS Settings, at any time. Explo works the same without them.
Photos
When you choose to save or share a picture of your map, Explo can add it to your photo library. It only saves; it does not read your photos.
Travel advice
The country guide and your trips show the UK government's public travel advice for a country, and the optional travel advice alerts (Account sheet) watch it for the countries on your want-to-go list and in your trips. For this the app reads pages from GOV.UK (the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office's advice, under the Open Government Licence v3.0). These are plain reads with no account details, name or email in them; GOV.UK can see your IP address and which country pages are requested, like any website. The alerts are worked out and scheduled on your phone: there is no Explo server watching for you, so an alert arrives when the app next looks (when it opens, and when iOS allows a background check, usually about once a day).
Anonymous usage statistics
To see which parts of Explo get used, which countries people are interested in and what to build next, the app and this website send anonymous usage statistics to PostHog, an analytics service, on servers in the EU (Frankfurt, Germany). They are never sold, used for advertising or combined with anything else.
- In the app: what happened (a screen opened, a country marked as visited or wanted, a country guide opened, a trip added, a map shared, a setting changed) and, for that, which country, the passport you chose, a trip's destination countries and, as ranges, how far ahead it is and how long. Every event also carries the app version, your iOS version, your phone's language, region and time zone, whether you are signed in, how many countries you have marked (as a range, like 5–9), how many days ago you installed the app, and a random number made on your phone the first time you open the app. That number is not linked to your account, name or email, and Explo does not use your advertising ID.
- Never from the app: your exact location, trip dates, trip names, notes, photos, name, email address or account ID.
- On this website: which page was viewed, which site you came from, the page and browser language, the region and time zone your browser reports (not worked out from your IP address), whether you are on a phone or a computer, clicks on “Get the app” and on links to other sites (only the other site's domain) and, if you sign up for visa alerts, the passport you picked (never your email address). Not the part of the address after the page name, no cookies and no location from your IP address. A random number is kept in your browser tab until you close it, so we count visits, not people. We do not measure your map on explo.world/my-map/ or the public pages, and we honour Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control.
- Your IP address: PostHog receives it with every request, as any server does. It is set not to store IP addresses and not to work out a location from them.
- Switching it off: in the app, open Passport, tap the account icon and turn off Share anonymous usage; the random number is deleted at that moment. On the website, turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser.
What we don't do
- No advertising and no ad or tracking SDKs.
- No crash-reporting services, and no analytics beyond the anonymous statistics described above, which are never tied to you or your account.
- No location tracking. Explo only looks at your location if you turn on arrival notifications, and then only on your phone, to find the country you are in. It is never sent anywhere or kept as a history.
- No selling or sharing of personal data.
This website
explo.world sets no cookies. It counts page views anonymously, as described under “Anonymous usage statistics”, and it remembers your chosen language in your browser's own storage, and that stays on your device. Our web host, GoDaddy, may log visits and measure page performance as part of running the site.
Children
Explo isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their data.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date above and mention it in the app's release notes.
Contact
Questions or data requests: support@explo.world