Last updated: June 2, 2026
When you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive your email address and display name. We use this to create your account and manage your narration balance.
Guideline requires location access to provide real-time narrations about your surroundings. Your GPS coordinates are streamed to our server during an active tour session to generate contextual audio content, and are used on-device to record your trip path for the journal. Your raw live location stream is processed in real time and is not permanently stored on our servers after your session ends.
So the guide doesn't repeat itself and can connect your current spot to somewhere you've been before, we store a per-user list of places we have narrated to you. Each entry holds the place name, its approximate coordinates and neighborhood, when and how many times we told you about it, and a short snippet of what the guide said. We also store a numeric text embedding of that snippet (computed via OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small model) so the guide can recall similar places by meaning. This list is tied to your account and persists between sessions. Deleting a trip from your journal removes the places linked to it; deleting your account removes all of it.
If you attach photos to your trip journal, the app reads your photo library on-device to match photos to a trip day using each photo's capture time and EXIF GPS location. This matching happens entirely on your device. Photos and their location metadata are stored in your trip journal (on-device and your private iCloud) and are not uploaded to our servers.
When you use the "talk to your guide" feature, the app captures audio from your microphone so you can speak to the guide. Your spoken request is converted to text and sent to our server to generate a response. We do not record or store your raw audio on our servers.
Your walking path, narration history, attached photos, and trip metadata are stored locally on your device using Apple's SwiftData framework. If iCloud is enabled, this data syncs to your personal iCloud account via Apple CloudKit so it follows you across your devices. It is never sent to our servers.
When you buy a narration pack or time pass, we record the purchase (product, transaction identifier, amount, and expiry) to apply it to your account. Payments themselves are handled by Apple (In-App Purchase) or Stripe — we never receive or store your card details.
We track aggregate usage metrics (narration count, API token usage, cost) for billing and service optimization. This data is associated with your account but does not include your specific locations.
Guideline uses the following third-party processors to provide its functionality. The specific AI providers we route to may change over time:
Each of these services has its own privacy policy. Data shared with these services is limited to what is necessary for Guideline's functionality.
All communication between the Guideline app and our servers is encrypted using TLS (HTTPS/WSS). Authentication tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain. We do not store passwords — authentication is handled entirely by Apple and Google's OAuth systems.
Guideline is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top indicates when the most recent changes were made.
For privacy-related inquiries, contact: