Privacy policy
Nahgoo is an app about walking to real places. That means it is an app that could very easily know too much about where you go. This page is the specific, checkable version of what it actually stores.
Last updated 1 October 2026
Nahgoo does not store your location. Not your GPS coordinates, not a trail, not a history of where you have been standing.
What it stores is which public places you captured, and when — the coordinates saved against a capture are the place's coordinates, the same ones on the public map, not yours.
Your live position is used in the moment to draw the map, measure how far away a pin is, and ask what is nearby. Then it is gone. Nothing writes it down.
That distinction is the whole of this policy, so it is worth being plain about the part that is still sensitive: a list of places you were within 25 metres of, each with a timestamp, is a record of where you have been — even though it is assembled out of public coordinates rather than your own. It is treated that way below.
You can open Nahgoo and browse the map, open places, search, and follow a guide or a place someone shared with you without making an account.
While you browse that way, nothing is stored about you: there is no account, and anything the app needs to remember — like a guide you opened — is held in your browser's memory only for that visit and is gone when you close or reload the page. The map still has to ask other services for map images, search results and nearby places, exactly as described under Who else receives anything, and the app keeps the anonymous usage counts below.
Capturing a place, saving it to a guide, building a guide, submitting a gem, reporting a problem and the leaderboard all need an account, because they are the things worth keeping. Tapping one of them asks you to sign in or create a free account; everything in the next section applies from that point on.
An email address and a password. The password is handled by our authentication provider and is never visible to us in a readable form.
The name you choose when you sign up. It is the one part of your account that is public. It appears as the credit — "Submitted by ___" — on any gem you submit and get approved, shown to everyone who sees that place, not only to you. That is the point of it: on Nahgoo every recommendation is meant to trace back to a real person.
It carries nothing else — no email, no location, no capture history. If you would rather not be credited, leave your name empty and no name is shown; your gems stay on the map either way. Everything else in your account, below, is the opposite: readable only by you.
For each place you capture:
Plus the totals built out of those: how far you have travelled, and which stamps you have earned. Guides you have made or saved, and gems you have submitted, are stored against your account too.
This is readable only by you. It sits in your own row, protected by row-level security, and nothing in the app shows one person's captures to another person. That is a design rule, not just a current fact.
If you choose to take a photo at the moment you capture a place, that photo is stored privately in your account (in Supabase Storage), so it survives across your devices and a cleared browser cache. It is readable only by you, protected by row-level security the same way your captures are — never public, never shown to anyone else, and never part of a submitted gem. Taking a photo is always optional, and you can skip it on any capture.
To tell a real capture from a faked one, each capture also records how accurate your GPS reading was at that moment, how far from the pin you were, whether the app was in simulate mode, and a timestamp. None of these are coordinates.
This is deleted after 30 days, automatically, leaving only two values: a version number, and whether simulate mode was used. It is evidence with an expiry, not history.
So we can tell whether anyone is actually using Nahgoo — including people who haven't made an account — the app keeps a simple count of activity.
No location is included. Not your position, not the part of the map you were looking at, not which place you opened. These counts are read only by us, as totals, and are deleted after 90 days.
Because the ID lives in your browser, clearing your browser's storage or using a private window gives you a new one. That makes the counts a little high, which is fine for their purpose: seeing whether people are using the app, not identifying them.
So we can see which cities to put more work into, the app also keeps a running tally of where places are being looked at.
Because people often open places near them, a busy square does suggest people are using Nahgoo around there — that is what it's for — but no count can be traced back to you or your device. These tallies are read only by us, and are deleted after 400 days.
A map app cannot work without asking other people's servers for things. Here is every one of them, and what it sees.
Sees: your IP address, and which square of the map you are looking at, continuously while the map is open.
This is the largest one, and it is inherent to showing you a map: the images are fetched by your phone as you pan and zoom. On a computer the map tiles come from OpenFreeMap; on a phone they come from Stadia Maps (sharper on high-resolution screens); and if either ever fails to load, they come from OpenStreetMap's own tile servers instead. Each one sees the same thing while it is the one serving your map.
Sees: what you type into search, and your approximate position — rounded to about 11 metres — as you type it.
The position is sent so that searching "main street" finds the one near you rather than the first one on earth.
Sees: the coordinates of a pin you tapped, which are public coordinates, and your IP address. Also what you type, if search falls back to it.
Used to turn a pin into a street address you can read.
Sees: the guide link, including its code.
When you send a guide link in iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack or similar, that app's own servers usually open the link to build a preview card. The code in the link is what unlocks the guide, so whoever runs your messaging app can see that guide too. The preview itself is generic — it doesn't include the guide's name or stops — and nothing about your location or account is in the link. If a guide is private, share the six-character code on its own instead of the link.
Sees: your account and everything listed above as stored, if you have an account; and, signed in or not, your exact position at the moment the app asks what is nearby.
That position is rounded to a roughly 5.5 km square as soon as it arrives, and the results are cached against that square in a shared table that carries no user identifier at all — so the cache cannot say who asked.
Place data itself comes from OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and Wikidata, plus short descriptions we write ourselves. The public sources are read-only: the app fetches from them through the service above, so they receive nothing from your device and never see your IP address.
We do not use advertising networks, third-party analytics, or tracking pixels. The anonymous usage counts above are our own and stay in our own database. Nothing here is sold, and nothing here is shared for advertising.
Your captures, stamps, guides and totals: for as long as your account is open. They are the point of the app — a passport that quietly erased your stamps after a year would be a broken product rather than a privacy improvement. They stay until you ask for them to go.
The integrity record: 30 days, then automatically stripped to two non-locational values.
The nearby-places cache: about three weeks, keyed to a 5.5 km square, with no user attached.
Anonymous usage counts: 90 days, then deleted automatically. They carry a random device ID and no account or location.
Where places are being opened: 400 days, then deleted automatically. Each is a date, a roughly 70-mile square and a count — nothing about who opened anything.
You can ask us what is held on your account, ask for a copy of it, or ask for it to be erased. Depending on where you live you may have these as legal rights; we will honour the request either way.
What a deletion does not automatically reach — the first two are stated in the app too:
If what the app stores changes, this page changes in the same release, and the date at the top moves. It is written from the code rather than alongside it, so a change to one is meant to be a change to both.