Privacy

Lookstory needs to know where you are and, when you ask, to see what you are looking at. This page says what happens to both.

Your location

Your phone shares your position with Lookstory only after you allow it. It is sent to our server to find the places near you. When you open a place while out walking, we record that visit with your position rounded to about ten metres. We do not keep a trail of where you have been between places.

Your photos

A photo you take is made smaller on your phone, sent to our server, and passed with the list of nearby places to the AI service that matches it. Then it is discarded. We do not save your photos anywhere.

Your questions

A question you ask about a place is sent to the same AI service together with what Lookstory knows about that place. We do not store what you asked.

What we keep

• A random identifier stored on your device, so that one visit’s activity belongs together. It is not your name, email or phone number, and it is not tied to an account.
• Simple events, such as “opened”, “photo taken”, “story played” and which place a story belonged to. We use them to see whether Lookstory is useful.
• The places you opened, as described above.
• When a photo matches nothing Lookstory knows, the rough area it was taken in, to about a hundred metres, so we can see where stories are missing.

The list of places you have already heard is kept on your own device and never sent to us. So are copies of the pages you open, so that they still open without a connection.

If you sign in

Most of Lookstory works without an account. A few things ask you to sign in with Google: walking with you, stories told for children, and a few words about your own photo. When you do, Google tells us your name and email address, and that is all we keep. We do not see your password, your contacts or anything else in your Google account. To have your account removed, write to us at the address below.

Counting visits, if you allow it

Lookstory asks once whether it may count visits with Google Analytics. Only if you say yes is anything of Google’s loaded: it then sets cookies and tells Google which pages were opened, from roughly where, and on what kind of device. If you say no, or do not answer, nothing is loaded and nothing is sent. Your answer is kept on your device.

Ask me again

What we do not do

• No advertising and no advertising trackers.
• No third-party analytics, unless you allow it (see below).
• No cookies, unless you sign in or allow visits to be counted. Signing in sets one, and all it does is keep you signed in.
• We do not sell or share your data.

Other services involved

• The map screen is drawn by Mapbox, which receives the area of map you look at.
• The stories you listen to are recordings, made in advance from our own text with Google’s speech service; nothing about you is sent to make them. Answers to your questions, and a story that has no recording, are read aloud by your phone or browser’s own voice. Some browsers send that text to their maker to do so.

Who is responsible, and how to reach us

Lookstory is run by Tan Gravam. To ask what we hold about your device, to have it deleted, or for anything else about your privacy, write to tan.gravam@gravam.com. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes the identifier and the list of places you have heard from your device.