TraceVoy

Privacy

Updated 9 October 2026

TraceVoy makes films of your trips on your iPhone. It is built to do that without collecting anything about you.

Your photos

You choose photos with the iPhone photo picker, and TraceVoy works only with the photos you pick. On the iPhone it reads each photo's time and place from its metadata (EXIF) and looks at what is in it with Apple's Vision framework.

A smaller copy of each picked photo is kept with its trip, on the iPhone, so the film can show it. Your photos and what TraceVoy learns from them are never sent anywhere.

Places and trips

Stops, the legs between them, the way of travel and the routes are all worked out on the iPhone. Place names come from an offline gazetteer (GeoNames) built into the app and from points of interest in the map tiles already on the device.

Trips are saved in TraceVoy's own storage on the iPhone. Deleting a trip removes it; deleting the app removes everything TraceVoy kept.

Title ideas

When Apple Intelligence is on, title ideas are written by Apple's on-device Foundation Models. The model gets a few lines of text about the trip (place names, dates, ways of travel, distance) and runs on the iPhone; nothing leaves it. When Apple Intelligence is off, TraceVoy suggests simple titles from the place names instead.

Map tiles

To draw maps, TraceVoy downloads map tiles: square pieces of the world map, fetched by their grid position and the same for everyone who views that area. Map data comes from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org) and terrain from Mapterhorn (tiles.mapterhorn.com). No photo, photo location, trip or account goes with these requests.

Like any web request, those servers see your device's IP address and the tile asked for, and so roughly which part of the map is being drawn. Each request names the app (TraceVoy and its version) in its user agent. Mapterhorn says it keeps request logs, including IP address and user agent, for up to 30 days; see its privacy policy. For OpenFreeMap, see openfreemap.org.

Tiles are cached on the iPhone, so an area is not downloaded twice. Settings → Map data → Clear saved tiles removes them.

Saving and sharing

When you save a film or poster to Photos, iOS asks for add-only access: TraceVoy can add to your library but cannot see what is in it. When you share, the iOS share sheet sends the file where you choose, and that service's own policy applies there.

This website

tracevoy.velonspace.com is a static site served by Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare keeps standard server logs (such as IP address and time) to run and protect the service. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no fonts or scripts from other sites.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is posted on this page with a new date.

Contact

Questions about privacy are welcome. The address is on the Support page.