Effective September 6, 2026
Privacy policy
WaySage is designed without accounts, advertising, purchases, subscriptions, analytics, tracking, or an application backend. A separate support service processes only problem reports you choose to send.
Information used by the app
Location
WaySage uses your device location to discover nearby places, order stories for your walk, and keep an active guide relevant. With your permission, background location is used only during an active guided walk so the guide can continue when the screen is locked. Stopping the walk stops WaySage location updates.
Coordinates and search context are sent directly from your device to public knowledge services needed to discover places and retrieve source material, including Wikipedia and other Wikimedia services, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap/Overpass. Those services receive network information such as your IP address and the request itself under their own privacy terms. WaySage does not operate a proxy or receive a copy of those requests.
Content stored on your iPhone
WaySage stores discovered places, consulted source material, generated story text, audio, representative images, playback progress, and preferences locally so stories can be reused. Some of that guide content may have been prepared by other WaySage devices and fetched from the community cache described below. You can remove reusable guide content with Settings → Delete cached files. The bundled language model is part of the app and is not removed by that control.
Support and problem reports
If you contact support, we receive the information you choose to send, such as your email address and message. If you use Settings → Diagnostics → Report issue, WaySage prepares an email containing your required description, app and operating-system versions, recent preparation failures, web-search health, and recent technical logs. Your system mail composer shows the complete message; you may edit, save, send, or cancel it. Do not include sensitive personal information.
Your mail provider and WaySage's inbound-mail provider process the sent message, including the sender address needed for email transport. A valid marked report becomes an issue in WaySage's private GitHub repository, but the sender address, email headers, signatures, and text outside the marked report are omitted from that issue. The report is used only to investigate and fix the problem.
On-device AI
Story generation and speech rendering run on your iPhone. WaySage does not send prompts, source material, generated stories, or audio to a hosted AI provider.
Community guide sharing
Generated guide content — discovered place records, consulted source material, story text, narration audio, and representative images — is contributed to and fetched from a community peer-to-peer cache shared by WaySage devices, so your device can play guides other devices already prepared. There is no server: devices exchange this content directly over encrypted peer-to-peer connections, and each device holds only the slice of the cache around the places it visits. Content another device contributed may be stored on and re-served by your device, and content your device contributed may be stored on and re-served by other users' devices. The Terms of Use carry the sharing terms.
Your device participates under a pseudonymous cryptographic key created on the device. It carries no name, account, email address, or other identity detail, and it is not linked to you. To find nearby content, your device joins sharing regions derived from its position at city scale only: other participants can observe interest in a city, never your precise location, route, or listening activity. Contributions are delayed and batched so upload timing does not trace a walk.
Your walks never leave the device: active-walk state, playback and listening history, preferences, routes, and timings are never shared through any path. You can turn community sharing off at any time with the Settings → Community guide cache toggle; guides are then prepared on your device only.
What WaySage does not do
- No account or identity profile.
- No advertising or cross-app tracking.
- No automatic crash-reporting, analytics, or behavioral telemetry collector.
- No sale of personal information.
- No hosted AI inference.
- No server that stores or relays guide content, walks, routes, or listening activity — community sharing is device-to-device.
- No problem report leaves the device unless you choose to send it from the system mail composer.
Permissions and choices
You can decline location permission, but a guided walk cannot start without a current location. You can change location access at any time in iOS Settings. You can use the in-app cache deletion control while no walk is active.
Children
WaySage is a general-audience travel app and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect account information from children because the app has no accounts.
Security and retention
Guide content remains in the app's private local storage until you delete cached files or remove the app. Deleting cached files clears your local copy, including content fetched from the community; guide content your device already contributed may remain available from other participating devices, which is how the community cache works. Ordinary support correspondence is retained only as needed to answer, maintain records, and meet legal obligations. A raw problem-report email is deleted after successful issue creation; if processing fails, it expires within seven days. The private engineering issue is retained as needed to investigate, fix, and document the problem. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure.
International use
Public knowledge services may process direct device requests in countries other than your own, and community cache peers may be located anywhere. Their policies govern their processing. WaySage is not offered in mainland China.
Changes
We may update this policy as the app changes. The effective date above identifies the current version.
Contact
Privacy questions: privacy@waysage.app.