GlobsieGlobsie is a travel journal. It records the places you have been, what you wrote about them, and what you would like to see next. This policy explains what the app stores, what leaves your device, and what you can do about it.
Who is responsible
Serhan Topuz, Germany, is the controller of the personal data described here — an individual developer, not a company. You can reach me at support@globsie.com.
The App Store lists the developer account as registered in Türkiye. That is where the account for distributing the app is held; decisions about the data described on this page are made by me, in Germany, and that is what determines who is responsible for it.
Using the app without an account
An account is optional and the app does not ask for one. Used this way, every trip, wish, journal entry, goal and photograph is stored only in the app's own storage on your device. None of it is transmitted to us, and we have no way to see it. Deleting the app deletes it.
The one exception is the map itself, described under Map data below.
What we store if you create an account
Account details
| Email address | To identify the account, send sign-in codes, and let you reset a password. |
|---|---|
| Password | Stored only as a cryptographic hash by our authentication provider. We never see it. |
| Username | Your chosen name for the account. |
| First and last name | To address you in the app. |
| Date of birth | Optional. You may leave it blank. |
| Gender | Optional. You may leave it blank or choose not to say. |
| Profile photo | Optional. Stored with your account in Germany, and shown to your friends. |
| Cover photo | Optional. The picture across the top of your profile, stored with your account in Germany and shown to your friends. |
Your travel records
Backed up so that signing in on another device shows the same log:
- Places visited and planned — country, city, an optional title, dates, rating, category, and trip grouping.
- Map coordinates for those places, described below.
- Journal entries — their dates and the text you wrote.
- Goals you have set for yourself.
- References to your photographs — a filename and the picture's dimensions. The images themselves only if you turn on photo backup, below.
Your photographs
Photographs you attach to a journal entry or use as a cover are stored on your device, and by default only there. A second device signed into the same account will know that an entry has photographs attached and will show a placeholder in their place.
Photo backup is off until you turn it on, in Settings › Data. While it is on, the app uploads a copy of each photograph — the same resized JPEG the app keeps on your device, with no location in it — to a private folder for your account, stored in Germany. No policy lets anybody but you read it: not your friends, and not other users. A device signed into your account brings the photographs back from it, which is the point. A copy whose entry you deleted is removed about a week later.
Turning backup off stops new uploads, and asks whether to keep the copies already made or delete them. Deleting your account deletes them all.
Without backup, if you lose your device the places and the writing survive and the photographs do not. The app's own export file does not carry photographs either way.
Separately, a photograph you choose to share with friends is uploaded as described under Friends below.
About coordinates
The app has no access to your device's location and never requests that permission. A place's coordinates come either from a list of world cities bundled inside the app, or from a pin you place on the map deliberately. They describe a place you told us about — not where you are, and not where you have been in real time.
Friends
Friends is part of every account. It lets people who have both agreed to be friends see the trips each of them chooses to share. There is no public profile, no follower list and no feed of strangers, and nothing of yours is shared until you share a trip. Creating an account or signing in means accepting the Terms of Use.
What your friends can see
- Your name, your username, and a profile photograph and a cover photo, if you add them.
- For each trip you switch to Friends: its title, its countries and cities, the month and year — or the exact days, if you choose — its rating, its category and its cover picture.
- Only the journal days you tick, with their text and the photographs you leave in.
- How many countries, cities, days and trips you have travelled, how many friends you have, and which countries — unless you turn this off in Settings › Sharing. Not the trips themselves.
- The countries on your wishlist — unless you turn this off in Settings › Sharing. Never a wish's dates, notes or how keen you are.
- Milestones, if you turn on Share my milestones in Settings › Sharing: a round number of countries you reach, or a country you visit for the first time, with the day it happened. Only from when you turn it on; turning it off deletes them.
- A heart or a comment you leave on a trip, with your name and profile photograph. Everyone who can see that trip sees it: the friend who shared it, and their friends, including people who are not your friends.
Friends never see map coordinates, trips you have not shared, your goals, the details of your wishes, your email address, date of birth or gender. A trip that is still under way is shared only once it has ended, unless you choose to share it while you are there.
What is uploaded
A shared trip is stored as a separate copy holding only what is listed above. A shared photograph is re-encoded on your phone before it is uploaded, which removes the information embedded in the file, including any location, and is stored in two sizes in Supabase Storage in Germany. It can only be fetched through a short-lived link that our database issues to you and to your friends.
A comment is stored with the trip it is on, in Germany, with the time it was written and the account that wrote it. It is at most 500 characters, and the app checks it against a list of words that are not allowed before it is sent. A heart is stored the same way, as a mark from your account on that trip.
Finding people
Someone can find you by typing your exact username or by scanning your code. A partial name finds nobody, so the list of members cannot be browsed, and your contacts are never uploaded. With Hide me switched on (in Edit profile), only someone who scans your code can find you or send you a request; the friends you already have stay, and you can still send requests yourself. The code carries a secret that only your account holds, and making a new one stops every older code from working.
Reports and blocking
You can report a shared trip, a photograph, a comment or a person, and block anyone. A report holds the reason you choose, an optional note, what you reported — for a comment, also its words, so the report still makes sense if the comment is deleted — and your account identifier. Only the developer reads it — an email through Resend says it has arrived — and it is used only to enforce the Terms of Use. The person reported is not told who reported them. A blocked person is not told either, and neither of you can see or find the other, or the other's hearts and comments.
Taking it back
Switching a trip back to Only me, or unticking a day or a photograph, deletes its shared copy and the uploaded photographs; unsharing a trip also deletes every heart and comment on it. You can delete your own comment at any time, and any comment on your own trip. Removing a friend, or blocking someone, ends what each of you sees of the other and deletes the hearts and comments between you. Deleting your account deletes all of it. Anything your friends had already seen could have been saved by them, which no app can prevent.
Feedback you send us
Settings → Send feedback (the gear on the You tab) writes a message to our database. It holds the subject and the text you type, the app's version number and whether you are on iOS or Android — the app tells you this on the form itself — and, if you are signed in, your account identifier, so that a reply can find you. Sent without an account, it carries nothing that identifies you.
It is stored alongside the rest of the data described above, in Germany, and is used only to answer you and to fix what you reported. Nobody using the app can read what anybody else has sent, including their own messages.
A message outlives the account that sent it, without the account. If you close your account, the identifier attached to your feedback is removed and the message itself is kept — a bug report is something you told us about the app, not a record we hold about you, and once it is no longer linked to anybody it is no longer personal data. If you would rather a message went too, ask us and it will be deleted.
What we do not do
- No advertising, and no sale or sharing of personal data with advertisers.
- No analytics of our own. We do not measure what you do in the app, and nothing reports your activity back to us. The map component's own telemetry, which would go to Mapbox rather than to us, is switched off — see Map data below.
- No behavioural profiling, and no tracking across other apps or websites.
- No access to your device's location, contacts, calendar or microphone.
- No reading of your photo library beyond the individual pictures you choose to attach.
Crash reports
If the app crashes or hits an error it cannot recover from, it can send a crash report to Sentry, the service we use to find and fix those faults. A report contains the technical trace of where the error happened, your device model, its operating system version and the app's version. It contains none of your records — no places, journal entries or photographs — and no account identifiers: no name, email address or user id, and Sentry is set not to store IP addresses. Reports are not linked to you and not used for tracking. They are only sent from builds where crash reporting is switched on.
Services we rely on
We use a small number of providers to run the app. They process data on our instructions only.
| Supabase | Database, account authentication and hosting for the backup described above, and storage for photographs you share with friends or back up. Your records are stored in Germany (Frankfurt, AWS eu-central-1), inside the European Union. |
|---|---|
| Resend | Delivers sign-in and password-reset emails, and tells the developer when a report arrives. Receives your email address and the message, or the contents of the report. |
| Mapbox | Supplies the map component. When the map starts, the component tells Mapbox it is in use, which reveals your IP address. The country shapes are part of the app, so nothing about where you look on the map is requested. |
| Apple, Google | Only if you choose to sign in with Apple or with Google. They confirm your identity to us and pass on your email address and name. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, the address we receive is Apple's relay address and not your own — we never see the real one. |
Where your data is processed
Your travel records and account details are stored in the European Union, as described above. Some of the providers listed are established in the United States and may process data — an email address in transit, an IP address serving a map tile — outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens, it is covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or another safeguard permitted under Chapter V of the GDPR, as set out in each provider's own terms.
Map data
The map's country shapes are part of the app, so drawing the map downloads nothing and works with no connection. The map component is Mapbox's, and it does contact Mapbox when it starts, so that Mapbox can count its use; that request reveals your IP address, whether or not you have an account. Mapbox's own privacy policy is at mapbox.com/legal/privacy.
The Mapbox component can also collect usage telemetry for Mapbox, under Mapbox's own policy. Globsie switches it off every time it starts. We would not receive it either way.
How long we keep things
Your records are kept for as long as your account exists. When you delete a record, its contents are erased and a marker holding only its identifier and the time of deletion is retained for 90 days, so that a device which has been offline learns of the deletion instead of restoring the record. After that the marker is removed too.
What you share with friends is kept until you stop sharing it, turn Friends off or delete your account. Hearts and comments are kept as long as the trip they are on stays shared, and go with either account. A report is kept after either account involved closes, with the account identifiers removed, as the record of what was done about it.
Deleting your account removes your account details, every travel record attached to it, and everything you shared with friends. The two things that do not simply disappear with it are described plainly rather than buried: feedback you sent us is kept with its link to you removed, as described above; and if you signed in with Apple, the permission you granted Apple lives on your device rather than on our servers, so only you can withdraw it — see below.
Your rights
Two of these are built into the app and need no request:
- Export — Settings → Export writes your complete records to a file you keep.
- Deletion — Settings → Delete account closes the account and removes the data held for it. Records kept only on your phone are untouched by this; the app says so on the same screen, because deleting an account and deleting your travel log are different things and people reach for the wrong one.
If you signed in with Apple, one step is yours rather than ours. Deleting your account here removes everything we hold, but it cannot take this app off your Apple ID — that permission is held by Apple, on your device, and only you can withdraw it. Open Settings, tap your name, then Sign in with Apple, and find this app in the list. That list is Apple's, so the entry may be named after the app's identifier rather than after the app. Tap it, then Stop Using Apple ID. The app shows you the same instruction at the moment you delete the account.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to access, correct, restrict or object to the processing of your data, and to complain to your national data protection authority. Write to support@globsie.com and we will respond within one month.
Children
Globsie is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the app after a change means accepting the updated policy.
Questions about any of this: support@globsie.com