Legal
Privacy policy.
What we collect, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and how to delete it.
- Last updated 5 September 2026
- Draft, pending legal review
This policy is a draft that has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer against the Privacy Act 2020 and, for visitors from the EU, the GDPR. It describes what the app actually does today, and it will be updated once that review is complete.
What we collect
Without an account, HeriTrail works anonymously: your device’s location is used to find places near you and is never sent to our servers, and anything you save stays on your device.
With an account, we store:
- Your email address, and your name and profile photo if you sign in with Google or Apple and choose to share them.
- Which sign-in method you used.
- Places you save, and any collections you make. A collection you choose to share gets a public link; anyone with that link can see the collection's name and the places in it, but not your name or email.
- Places you check in at, if you turn on the visited passport, with the date. You can delete individual stamps or the whole history from the Passport screen.
- Day plans you build in the itinerary planner.
- Reports and story suggestions you send us, including any photo you choose to attach. Photos are stored privately: only you and our reviewers can see them.
- Which trails you have finished in family mode. Nothing about the answers a child gives is stored: not what they answered, not how many attempts, not a score.
- Events you save.
- Questions you ask the guide. The question is logged without any link to you, so we can see what our content fails to answer. Separately, we count your requests to stop one account overloading the service; that count is not kept with the question.
Your practice recordings in the pronunciation feature never leave your phone. They are written to the app’s temporary storage, played back, and deleted when you close the practice sheet. We have nowhere to upload them to.
Offline region packs, meaning the places, trails and map tiles you download, are stored on your device only.
Why we collect it
To operate the features you use: signing you in, syncing your saves across your devices, keeping your passport and day plans, and acting on the reports you send. We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell it.
How long we keep it
Until you delete it. You can delete your visited history from the Passport screen, individual saves and collections as you go, and your whole account from Profile, then your account, then Delete account.
Deleting your account immediately removes your account, your saves, collections, passport, day plans, badges, saved events and any photos you attached to reports.
One thing survives, and we want to be plain about it: the reports and story suggestions you sent stay, with your name and email removed, because a problem you told us about a place is still a problem after you leave. The text stays as you wrote it, so if you described yourself in it, that description stays too.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Account deletion is self-service in the app; for anything else, contact admin@thinkandform.co.nz.
Children
HeriTrail is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. Family mode is designed so that using it stores nothing about the child: no score, no answers, no profile, and nothing that could identify them.
Changes to this policy
We’ll update this page if what we collect or how we use it changes, and note the date at the top.