WanderTale — terms,
privacy & your account

Terms of use

WanderTale is an audio companion for road trips and walks: it tells stories about the places you pass. It is operated by Anatol Dragan, an individual developer in Romania (contact: contact@dragan.me). By creating an account you agree to these terms.

Your account

• You need an account to use WanderTale. You must be at least 16 years old, or have the consent of a parent or guardian.
• Keep your password safe; you are responsible for what happens through your account.
• You can delete your account at any time in the app (Settings → Delete account).

Drive safely

Stories are audio so your eyes stay on the road. Do not handle the phone while driving, and always follow traffic rules and road signs. Routes, detours and travel times are estimates, not navigation.

AI-generated content

Stories are written automatically by an AI model from public sources (Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and other web sources) and read aloud by synthetic voices — no human narrator. They can contain mistakes: check anything important, and tell us at contact@dragan.me when a story is wrong so we can fix it. Texts derived from Wikipedia are available under CC BY-SA 4.0; map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

Acceptable use

• Do not abuse the service: no scraping, automated requests, attempts to bypass limits, or access to other people's accounts.
• Your name, username and profile photo are seen by the people you travel with and, for public routes, by other users — keep them decent.

Routes you publish

Routes you make public are visible to other users together with your name. Do not publish anything unlawful, offensive or that infringes other people's rights. You keep the rights to what you publish and give us a licence to show it in the app. Users can report a route or block its author; a route reported by several users is hidden automatically and reviewed, and we may remove content or suspend accounts that break these rules.

Price

WanderTale is currently free. Usage limits may apply. If we ever introduce paid plans, we will announce them in the app before anything is charged, and nothing is charged without your explicit purchase.

Availability and liability

The service is provided “as is”, without guarantees of availability or accuracy, to the extent the law allows. We may change or discontinue features. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, or your rights as a consumer.

App Store

This agreement is between you and us, not with Apple. Apple has no obligation to provide support for the app, but is a third-party beneficiary of this agreement and may enforce it.

Governing law and changes

Romanian law applies. If you are a consumer in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence and may bring a claim there. We may update these terms; we will tell you in the app or by email about material changes before they take effect, and the date above always shows the current version.

Privacy policy

Data controller: Anatol Dragan, individual developer, Romania. Contact for anything about your data: contact@dragan.me. We process personal data under the GDPR (EU Regulation 2016/679). WanderTale shows no ads, does not track you across other apps or websites, and does not sell your data.

What we collect

• Account: email address, name, username, optional profile photo, home town, narration language, interests and story preferences. Your password is stored only as an argon2 hash; with Sign in with Apple or Google we store the provider's account identifier instead. We also keep a SHA-256 fingerprint of your email so friends who have you in their contacts can find you.
• Sessions: for each signed-in device, the IP address and app user agent at sign-in. A session ends after 30 days without use (90 days at most).
• Location: the app uses your precise location while you explore, drive or walk — also in the background, with the screen locked, if you allow location “Always” for background narration. We store only your last position (latitude, longitude, speed, heading and time, overwritten on every update) and the distance travelled, not a continuous GPS trail. We also keep the list of localities you passed, with the first time you passed each one, and your trips with their stops, detours and the stories heard along the way.
• Activity: stories you listened to or saved, your story passport, and routes you create or save.
• Contacts (optional): when you look for friends, the app reads email addresses from your contacts on the phone and sends only their SHA-256 fingerprints, to find who already uses WanderTale. The fingerprints are compared and discarded; we keep only a daily count of lookups (to stop abuse), never your contacts.
• Crews (shared trips): the other members of a crew see your name, profile photo, device name, connection signal and the next stop; your votes on stories are shared with them. “Join nearby” briefly uses your position to match you with a host within about 50 metres.
• Voice search (optional): while you hold the microphone, speech is turned into text by Apple's speech recognition, which may process the audio on Apple's servers. We receive only the text.
• Push notifications (optional): your device's push token.
• Security log: for actions in the app (sign-in, trips, changes to your account) we record your user id, IP address, platform, app version and the action — never your location.
• Diagnostics: when the app crashes it sends the error message and stack trace, platform and app version to our server and to Sentry. These reports are not linked to your account.
• Product interaction (analytics, linked to you, first-party only): a few usage events, described under First-party usage events below.

First-party usage events

To understand how people find and use WanderTale, the app sends a few usage events directly to our own servers — for example app first opened, sign-in screen shown, account created, a story played (the point of interest's ID only, never your location), a trip started, and the ad campaign name if you opened the app from a tagged link. They carry a random identifier created when the app is installed (not your device's advertising ID) and, once you are signed in, your account. We use no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs, do not track you across other apps or websites, and do not share these events with anyone. They are deleted after 400 days, and the link to your account is removed when you delete your account.

Why we use it, and on what legal basis

• To run your account and deliver the service — stories near you, trips, routes, crews, account emails: performance of our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• Background location, contact matching and push notifications: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), given through the phone's permission prompts. You can withdraw it at any time in the phone's settings; the rest of the app keeps working.
• Security log, abuse prevention, moderation of public routes, crash diagnostics and first-party usage events: our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and working (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Where the law requires us to keep or hand over data: legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)).

We make no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you. Stories are chosen by place, language and your interests only.

Who processes it

Only the providers we need to run the app, each under its data processing terms:

• Railway (United States) — hosts the server, the database and media storage (profile photos, audio).
• Google Gemini API (United States) — writes the stories. It receives data about places only (name, map tags, coordinates, public descriptions), never data about you.
• Modal (United States) — synthesises the narration voices from story text. No personal data.
• Mapbox (United States) — computes walking routes and some driving routes; it receives the coordinates of the route's start, stops and end, not your identity.
• Brevo (European Union) — sends account emails (verification code, password reset).
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (United States) and Apple Push Notification service — deliver push notifications.
• Sentry (United States) — receives server and app error reports.
• Apple and Google — Sign in with Apple / Google if you use them; Apple speech recognition for voice search.
• Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, OpenStreetMap — public sources our server reads about places. No personal data is sent to them.

Transfers outside the European Economic Area (to the United States) rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified, and otherwise on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

How long we keep it

• Account, preferences, last position, localities, trips, routes and listening history: until you delete them or your account.
• Sessions: until you sign out, or 30 days after last use (90 days at most).
• Contact fingerprints: not stored; only the daily lookup count, until your account is deleted.
• Security log: 180 days for actions, 14 days for views. It is kept for that period even after you delete your account, so that abuse and attacks can still be investigated.
• Server logs: up to 30 days. Error reports in Sentry: up to 90 days.
• Push token: until you sign out, delete the account, or the token expires.
• Usage events: 400 days; the link to your account is removed when you delete your account.
• Database backups: kept 14–20 days, then overwritten. Deleted data disappears from backups within that period.

Your rights

You have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection, and the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting earlier processing. Most data can be edited or deleted in the app; for anything else, including a copy of your data, write to contact@dragan.me — we reply within one month.

You may also lodge a complaint with a data protection authority, in particular where you live or work: in Romania ANSPDCP, in Italy the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, in the Republic of Moldova the National Center for Personal Data Protection (NCPDP).

Children

WanderTale is for people aged 16 and over. Younger users need the consent of a parent or guardian. If you believe a child gave us data without that consent, write to us and we will delete it.

Security

Traffic is encrypted with TLS, passwords are hashed with argon2, sessions use rotating refresh tokens, and access to production data is limited to the operator.

Changes

We will update this policy when the app changes what it collects, and tell you in the app or by email about material changes. The date at the top shows the current version.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, without asking us. Deletion is immediate and permanent.

From the app

Open WanderTale → Settings → Delete account and confirm. If you used Sign in with Apple, the app's access to your Apple ID is revoked as well.

If you can no longer open the app

Email contact@dragan.me from the address on the account, with the subject “Delete account”. We delete it and confirm to you.

What is deleted

Your account, profile and photo, sessions, push tokens, last position, localities, trips, crews, routes, saved and listened stories and preferences are deleted at once. Only the security log keeps your user id and IP address, for up to 180 days, and usage events stay for up to 400 days without the link to your account, as described in the privacy policy. Backups roll over within 14–20 days.