This policy explains how MythFog handles personal data. It covers the iOS app and mythfog.com. We do not sell your personal data.
1. What we collect
- Visits: location, H3 cells, visit distance and time. Continuous location starts only after you begin a visit.
- Life trail (off by default, only if you turn it on): only after you turn the life trail on in the app and allow location in the system dialog does it record background location samples and shape them into stays and journeys. Raw samples stay on this phone and are deleted automatically after 30 days by default (7 / 30 / 90 days if you change it in Settings); what reaches the server is compressed segment summaries and H3 trail cells, not every raw point. You can pause or turn it off at any time, and you can choose not to sync and keep the trail on this phone only.
- Captures: field photos (uploaded after sign-in), capture time, location / H3, category, and notes you write.
- Account: Sign in with Apple or Google identifiers; you may give a nickname, email, and birthday.
- Safety check-in (Visit Guardian): the guardian email you add, an emergency contact (stored encrypted), check-in times, and last valid location only if you opt to attach it.
- Flight journal: flight numbers, airports, dates, and whether you took the flight; if you forward mail, the private inbound.mythfog.com address, parsed legs, and the subject and body of the mail (kept as received, not the filtered version sent for parsing; up to 90 days, used only to retry when reading fails and to investigate problems, and not used to train models or improve data; deleted when you revoke consent).
- Import data (MythFog Pass): the CSV exported from Flighty is parsed on your phone and only basic flight details are uploaded (flight number, airports, date, airline), never the original file, seat, booking code, or notes; each batch can be removed as a whole. The subscription itself is verified from Apple's transaction data; we keep the expiry date and transaction identifier, not your payment method.
- Omen food: calorie and nutrient estimates from the photo at manifestation. The trip journal shows or shares them only if you turn that option on.
- Activity and Health data: with your permission we read step count, walking distance, and sleep hours from Apple Health. Steps and walking distance stay on the device to compute exploration progress and are never uploaded. Sleep is uploaded to the server once a day as a number of minutes, used only to compute that day's ink reward, with no raw samples, is never written back into your Health data, and has no medical use. You can turn the permission off in iOS Settings at any time.
- Live location with a friend: only while you turn it on during a visit do we send coordinates to the server every 15 seconds, and only the one friend you picked can see them. Sending stops when the visit ends or when you stop it, and the server keeps only the latest point.
- Reports and blocks: a report you send is stored with the reporter, the reported content and account, the reason, and the time, so we can review and act on objectionable content; your block list is stored so a blocked user's content stops appearing.
- Diagnostics: the app reports, anonymously, crash counts, battery-related totals (foreground seconds, location-tracking seconds, CPU time), location permission downgrades or drops, and legacy-data migration mismatches, together with the iOS and app version. These signals exist only to tell us whether the app is broken. They never contain coordinates, H3 cells, routes, or free text, and your account identifier is stored as an irreversible hash that cannot be traced back to you.
- Manifestation: working photo copies, generated images, job status. JSON may carry latitude, longitude, and a country code as world context, not as JPEG EXIF.
2. Do photos upload
The shutter first writes the photo on the phone. After sign-in, every valid capture uploads to our private object store (observations) and is written into the observation record. Manifestation copies a working file into genesis-inbox. Generated art lives in a public creature bucket so you can see it on the card. Face detection only asks whether a face is present; it does not identify anyone. Photos with a face are not taken into the chronicle, uploaded, or manifested. A photo imported from your library with no EXIF location, or a location but no capture time, stays on the phone and is not uploaded.
3. How long we keep it
Originals on the device stay under your control. Raw location samples from the life trail never leave the device: they are deleted automatically after 30 days by default (7 / 30 / 90 days if you change it), and the server holds only the compressed stay and journey structure. Uploaded field photos are kept while the account exists; cloud pixels have GPS tags stripped, and capture GPS and time live in database fields. Working copies for manifestation are aimed for deletion after success, failure, or at most 24 hours. After you end the account, cloud personal fields, visit cells, trip journals, myth images, and field photos are all deleted, synced records on the phone — visit cells, sessions, journeys, trips, and daily segments — are cleared with them, and the Sign in with Apple authorization is revoked; MythFog Pass does not cancel itself, so cancel it in the App Store. Photos and cards on your phone stay there, marked local only, and are never uploaded or manifested again. So that you can still see them offline, the phone stores the friends list, the shared-journey list, weekly reflections, journey AI recaps, the Visit Guardian status (guardian labels and a masked email hint, never a full email address) and the first page of the trail timeline in its cache folder while you are online. These copies stay on your phone only, are kept out of iCloud and computer backups, and are cleared together when you sign out, delete your account or switch accounts; deleting your location history on this phone also clears the stored timeline page, and revoking consent for AI memory and recaps also clears the recap text stored on the phone. An email or birthday you change offline is kept only on your phone until it is sent, and is deleted as soon as it is sent to the server or the server rejects it.
4. Training and improving the service
Using uploaded, faceless field photos to improve recognition, safety filtering, and generation is optional. You can turn Photos for AI training off at any time on the traveler page (Profile); after that we stop putting your new photos into training data. Manifestation still uploads the photo, which is a separate purpose. Ending the account does not guarantee we can pull data back out of a third-party model training run already in progress.
5. Third parties
Infrastructure includes the database and object store, app hosting, the vision / image model providers used for manifestation, the email delivery service used for safety check-in notices and flight-journal forwarding, and AirLabs, the flight-data service used to look up timetables (it receives only flight numbers, airline codes and departure and arrival airport codes — never your identity, account or mail text). A third-party AI provider is used for two separate purposes, each with its own consent: parsing forwarded flight-journal mail (see section 1 and the flight-journal consent), and AI memory and recaps (search index and journey recaps; see section 11). Nothing is sent for a purpose you have not consented to. They process data only as needed to provide this service and under their own terms.
6. Your rights
Under Taiwan’s Personal Data Protection Act you may request access, review, correction, to stop collection / processing / use, or deletion. Use traveler details in the app or the contact published by the service. The app also offers these directly: pause or turn off the life trail in Location and trail settings, clear one day of trail, and delete your whole location history; on the traveler page, withdraw AI memory and recap consent, export your data (we pack it and then hand you a short-lived signed download link), and delete the account. Deleting location history and deleting the account each leave a deletion receipt showing what was removed and how many rows. None of these rights need a subscription, and no feature switch can block them. Turning off location or camera stops the matching features; it does not erase records already on the device.
7. Children
This service is not directed at children under 13. Such accounts will be deleted if found.
8. Changes
The policy version is 2026-10-05. A material change updates the version and may ask you to agree again.
9. Push notifications
We ask for the device push permission only after your first successful manifestation. The device push token is used to notify you when a manifestation completes and when daily ink refills; guardian reminder notices use the same permission. You can turn each of these off individually in traveler Settings; turning them off does not affect visiting, capture, or manifestation itself. Deleting the account deletes the device push token with it.
10. Life trail and background location (only if you turn it on)
The life trail is off by default. The app records location only after you turn it on yourself and allow location in the system dialog; for recording to continue while the app is not open, you must also allow the Always location permission separately. We never turn it on for you, and we do not take location in the background while it is off. You can pause it for a while or turn it off entirely in Location and trail settings at any time; a pause deletes nothing, does not put revealed fog back, and we do not switch to some other way of guessing where you are while paused. When the battery is low or you have not moved for a long time, sampling backs off on its own. Raw location samples stay on the device (30 days by default, 7 / 30 / 90 days selectable) and are deleted automatically once they expire; the server keeps only the compressed stay and journey structure and H3 trail cells. You may also choose not to sync at all and keep everything on this phone. Clearing one day of trail and deleting the whole location history are described in section 6.
11. AI memory and recaps (explicit consent required)
This is off by default. Only after you have read the explanation and explicitly consented do we send text — journey titles and notes, event titles — through our own gateway to a third-party AI provider, to build a searchable index and write journey recaps. What may be sent is decided by an allowlist: never precise coordinates, the location of your familiar places, live-location coordinates, or guardian emails, and never health data or content from someone you blocked. You can withdraw consent at any time on the traveler page; we stop sending immediately and delete the index already built on the server, and no feature switch can hold that up. A recap is the model's guess and can be wrong — please do not treat it as a record of fact.