Banksy privacy policy

Banksy has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no trackers. A lot of it runs on your phone and stays there. Some features use the internet, and this page says exactly what each of them sends.

What never leaves your phone

Your Rap Sheet. The counts on that screen are kept on your phone and nowhere else.

Likes in the Users Gallery. These are stored on your phone.

The Art Police. Your mugshot selfie and Wanted Poster are made on your phone. They are only saved if you choose to save them.

The parallax background. The app reads your phone's motion sensor to tilt the background. Those readings are used on the spot and never stored or sent.

What leaves your phone

The artwork

The street art pictures are kept on our server at aipple.net and downloaded when you look at them. Those requests ask for pictures and nothing else.

Users Gallery

What is sent. The photo you pick, and a place name if you choose to type one. The photo is re-saved on our server, which drops the hidden information a camera stores inside a picture file, such as GPS coordinates and the model of phone.

What happens next. Your photo goes to Keith by email. Nobody else can see it until he approves it. Approved photos appear in the gallery for everyone who uses the app, along with the place name if you typed one. Rejected photos are deleted. If you withdraw a photo before it has been looked at, it is never published.

Don't send photos of people who haven't agreed to be in them, or anything with a home address, car registration or other personal details in shot.

The Wall

When you paint on The Wall, the app sends your piece (a picture or text), where you put it on the wall, the tag name you typed if any, a place name if you typed one, and the random identifier. Like the gallery, nothing goes up until Keith approves it. Approved pieces, with the tag name and place, are visible to everyone using the app.

Viewing, liking, voting on or flagging a piece sends which piece it was and the random identifier, so that one phone counts once. If you flag a piece, the reason you choose is sent too.

What Would Banksy Do? and What's Wrong With This Picture?

The photo you take or choose is sent to our server, which passes it to Google's Gemini service. For What Would Banksy Do? it comes back as a new picture with its artist's statement; for What's Wrong With This Picture? it comes back as a written verdict. The photo is not saved on our server. The request carries the random identifier. Google processes the photo under its own terms, as part of answering the request. We use Google's paid service, under which Google does not use what is sent to improve its products.

News notifications

If you allow notifications, Apple gives the app a push token, which the app sends to our server together with the random identifier. We use it only to send occasional Banksy news through Apple's push notification service. Turn notifications off in Settings and they stop. Notifications telling you a photo or Wall piece of yours has been approved are made on your phone.

Banksy's Instagram and the news sites

The Instagram screen shows Instagram's own page, and the Street Art News links open other people's websites. Those pages come straight from Instagram and the sites themselves, under their own privacy policies, not ours. They may use cookies.

The random identifier

The first time you use one of the features above that mention it, the app makes up a random code and keeps it on your phone. It is not your name, your email, your Apple Account or your device's own identifier, and no other app can see it.

The AI features cost us money every time they run, so each copy of the app gets a limited number of goes. The only way to count them is to tell one phone from another, which is all the code is for. For those features our server stores nothing but the code and the time of each request, and deletes each record once it no longer counts toward the limit.

Permissions the app asks for

Camera: to photograph street art for the Users Gallery, The Wall, What Would Banksy Do? and What's Wrong With This Picture?, and for your Art Police mugshot.
Photos: to choose a photo to send.
Add to Photos: to save your Wanted Poster.
Motion: for the parallax background.
Notifications: for news, and to tell you when something you sent has been approved.

Your choices

You can turn off camera, photo, location and notification access for Banksy at any time in your iPhone's Settings, under Banksy. The features that need them stop working; everything else carries on.

Deleting the app deletes everything it keeps on your phone, including its random identifier. A reinstall starts again with a new one that can't be linked to the old one.

If you'd like a photo you sent us taken down, or want to know what we hold for your copy of the app, email admin@aipple.net. Because there are no accounts, we may ask you to describe the photo or tell us roughly when you sent it so we can find it.

Children

Banksy has no accounts and asks nobody for a name, email address or age. Photos sent to the gallery are checked by hand before anyone else can see them.

Where our server is

Our server is aipple.net, hosted by GoDaddy in the United States. Like any web server, it keeps standard access logs, which include the internet address a request came from. We use them only to keep the server running and secure.

Changes

If the app starts collecting anything new, this page will be updated before that version is released, and the date at the top will change.

Contact

Aipple Media, admin@aipple.net, or use the contact page.