Privacy policy

What never leaves your device

• Your photographs. Pictures you add to the User Gallery are copied into the app's own private storage on your device. They are not uploaded anywhere, not backed up to us, and not visible to anyone else. Deleting the app deletes them.
• Your photo library. The app uses Apple's system photo picker, which runs outside the app. We only ever receive the individual pictures you choose. The app cannot read your library and never asks to.
• Your location, when you use Around Me. This screen sorts the places in the app by how far away they are. The app asks your device for a single rough fix — accurate to about a hundred metres — and works out the distances on your phone, including whether you are near Paris at all. The fix is held in memory while the screen is open and is never written to storage. There is no background tracking of any kind.
• Around Me when you are not near Paris. A list of Paris places ordered by distance is no use to you then, so the screen offers to show what is near you instead. Only if you tap that does the app ask Apple Maps for places around you. That goes to Apple, under Apple's privacy policy rather than ours. We never see it, and the results are thrown away when you close the screen.
• French Sayings. The 75 sayings and both voices reading them are built into the app. Playing them sends nothing anywhere.
• Translating. Translate It turns your English into French using Apple's translation, which runs on your phone. What you type is not sent to us or to anyone else to be translated.
• Map pins. The pins on the maps come from coordinates built into the app. They are facts about Paris, not about you.
• Everything you read. The entries, quizzes and sayings are part of the app. We do not record what you open, how long you spend, or what you search for.

What does leave your device

Three things talk to our own server at aipple.net. None of them talks to anybody else directly, and the app holds no keys to anyone else's service.

Weather

This screen shows what the weather is doing where you are, with a line about it in French.

• Your position is rounded before it is sent. It goes to our server at two decimal places — roughly a kilometre square — and no finer figure ever leaves your phone.
• Nothing identifies you. The weather request carries the rounded position and nothing else: no identifier, no device information.
• The place name comes from Apple, not from us. To put a town above the figures, the app asks Apple's geocoder what that position is called; if you type a town in yourself, it asks Apple where that town is. Those lookups go to Apple, under Apple's privacy policy. We never see them.

Our server asks the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) for a forecast for that square and keeps the answer briefly, so the next person asking about the same square does not cause a second request. The app credits MET Norway on screen, as their free service requires.

Hearing the French — Weather and Translate It

When you tap to hear a weather line, or tap Hear it on a translation, the French is spoken by Google's Gemini speech service through our server. Two things are sent:

• What is to be spoken. For Weather, that is only which of the app's own lines to say — our text, not yours. For Translate It, it is the French translation on your screen. Our server passes it to Google, which returns the audio, and the audio comes back to your phone. We do not store your translations. They are not written to a database or kept in a log. Google processes them under its own terms as part of answering the request.
• A random identifier for your copy of the app. The first time you hear something spoken, the app generates a random code and keeps it on your device. It is not your name, your email, your Apple Account or your device's own identifier, and it is not shared with any other app, including our others.

What the identifier is for

Every new line costs us money to generate, so each copy of the app gets forty in any rolling day. The only way to count them is to tell one phone from another. Our server stores nothing but that random code and the time of each request, and drops a record once it is more than a day old. Anything you have heard before replays from your phone and counts for nothing.

Weather lines are the app's own words, so once a line has been spoken our server keeps that recording and plays it to whoever asks for it next. Your translations are never kept this way.

If you delete and reinstall the app, a new random code is generated. We have no way to connect the old one to the new one, or either of them to you.

What we never do

• We do not sell, rent or share your information with anybody.
• We do not use advertising or advertising identifiers.
• We do not track you across other apps or websites.
• We do not build a profile of you.
• We do not ask you to create an account or give us an email address.
• We do not track your location. The app asks for a single fix when you open Around Me or Weather, and never in the background.
• We do not keep any record of where you have been.

Links to other places

Entries link out to the people who run the places described — museums, monuments, transport operators, restaurants and so on — for tickets, opening times and bookings. Once you follow one you are on somebody else's site, under their privacy policy, not ours.

Children

Paris Eye is not directed at children. It does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age, beyond the random identifier and the rounded position described above.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it. Any change that affects what leaves your device will also appear in the app's release notes.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this, or about information held about your copy of the app, go to admin@aipple.net.