Privacy
The short version: we collect nothing about you.
Gorse does not hold your personal data. Your flags, journal entries and settings live on your device and, if you use iCloud, in your own private iCloud storage, which we cannot read. We run no servers that know who you are. The catalogue of historic places ships inside the app itself, so there is nothing to fetch and nothing to log. That is the whole picture, but read on for the detail.
What Gorse stores, and where
On your device
When you flag a site, write a journal note or change a setting, that is saved locally in Gorse's own storage on your iPhone. It never leaves your device unless you have iCloud switched on. You can delete everything at any time by deleting the app.
In your own iCloud, if you use it
If your Apple Account has iCloud enabled, Gorse syncs your flags and journal entries through CloudKit's private database, and your settings through iCloud's key-value store. Both are parts of iCloud that are personal to you, held in your name under Apple's own privacy policy. Gorse has no access to any of it: we cannot read it, query it or share it. It is your data, in your iCloud account.
iCloud is entirely optional. If it is unavailable or switched off, Gorse works normally as a local-only app.
In your Photos library
When you attach photos to a journal entry, Gorse uses Apple's own photo picker, which asks for no photo library permission and copies nothing to us. Your full-size photos stay in your Photos library. Gorse keeps a reference to each one, and a small thumbnail for resilience, on your device.
Location
Gorse asks for your location while the app is in use, never in the background, so it can show how far away each site is and sort results by distance. That is the only thing it is used for. It is never transmitted anywhere, never stored on any server and never linked to any identifier. If you decline, Gorse works fully; sites are sorted alphabetically instead of by distance.
The catalogue, and what the app fetches
The catalogue of historic places, and the photography that goes with it, ships inside the app itself and is updated when you update the app. Gorse makes no request to fetch site data or images: there is no endpoint to record your IP address, because there is no endpoint.
The one request Gorse makes on your behalf is the one you ask for - tapping through to a site's official page. That opens in Safari, outside the app, and from there you are on that organisation's own website, under their privacy policy rather than ours.
What we do not collect
No account is required, so no email address, name or password is ever collected. There is no profile of you on our servers, because there are no servers holding user data. No analytics, no tracking, no advertising, no crash-reporting SDK and no third-party SDKs of any kind. Gorse's App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, and it is accurate.
Image credits and photographer names
Some site photographs come from openly licensed collections, principally Wikimedia Commons and Geograph. Attribution is a legal requirement of the Creative Commons licences those images are shared under, so photographer names and source URLs appear in the app under About, then Image credits, generated from the catalogue.
Those names are third-party data. They belong to the photographers, not to you as someone using Gorse, and they are there solely to meet the licence obligation. They are not associated with any user data and not used for anything else.
Children
Gorse is rated 4+ on the App Store and is suitable for all ages. Because we collect nothing from anyone, no special measures are needed for younger users.
Your rights under UK GDPR
Because Gorse does not collect or process personal data on any server of ours, the principal rights under UK GDPR - access, erasure, portability - apply to the data Apple holds in your iCloud account rather than to anything held by us. You can exercise them directly through your Apple Account settings.
Changes to this policy
If we make a material change we will update this page and the effective date at the top before it ships. We will never make a change that reduces your privacy without clear notice.