Privacy Policy

This policy covers the Story Trail product family: the Story Trail walking web app (walk.storytrail.app), the Story Trail apps for iPhone and Android, and the Suburb Historian authoring tool (historian.storytrail.app), together “Story Trail” or “we” below. It’s the policy to link from an App Store or Play Store listing for any of these apps.

Story Trail is operated by Mark Smith, based in Victoria, Australia, as an independent project — not a registered company.

Information we collect

Account information. Sign-in is handled by our authentication provider, Clerk. When you create an account we (via Clerk) store your email address and any profile information you provide, such as your name or an organisation you belong to.

Beta sign-up form. If you join a beta through our sign-up form, we collect the name, email address (for Android, your Google account email), phone type, suburb, and answers about Suburb Historian and your local historical society that you enter. We use them only to add you to the beta, check there are trails near you, and get in touch about testing. The form runs on PostHog, and each response is emailed to us through Resend. Ask us to delete your answers whenever you like.

Location data. The walking app uses your device’s location to show trails near you and to detect when you’re close enough to a waypoint to check in (“proximity” check-in, typically within about 30 metres). Location is used while you’re actively using the app and is not collected in the background, and it isn’t sold or shared with advertisers. On iPhone and Android, the app asks your permission before using your location, and you can change that at any time in your phone’s settings.

Camera and AR. The iPhone and Android apps use your camera only in AR view, to draw the trail and its notice boards over the street in front of you. Story Trail itself doesn’t record, store or upload what your camera sees. To work out precisely where you’re standing and which way you’re facing, each app relies on its phone platform’s AR service:

• On Android, AR view runs on Google Play Services for AR (ARCore), which is provided by Google and governed by the Google Privacy Policy. AR view also uses ARCore’s Geospatial API: to power this session, Google will process sensor data (e.g., camera and location). Learn more about how Google Play Services for AR handles your data.
• On iPhone, AR view uses Apple’s ARKit, including its location anchors where Apple supports them, which compare what the camera sees with Apple’s map data. This is handled by Apple under Apple’s Privacy Policy.

Walk diagnostics. The iPhone and Android apps keep a diagnostics log on your phone, recording things like your GPS position during a walk, how AR content was placed, and app events, so we can track down problems. It stays on your phone unless you choose to share it with us from the Profile screen, and the Android app lets you clear it there too.

Content you create. If you use Suburb Historian to research and author a trail, we store the text, photos, source references, and map coordinates you or our AI tools produce, so your trail can be reviewed, edited, and published.

Photos. Photos you upload are stored to serve your trail. During research, Suburb Historian may also surface candidate historical photos from third-party archives — Trove (National Library of Australia), Flickr, and Wikimedia Commons — for you to select; those photos remain subject to their original source’s licence and attribution.

Technical data. Like any web service, our hosting infrastructure logs standard technical information — IP address, browser or device type, and request timestamps — for security and reliability purposes.

How we use it

We use this information to operate the apps: to show you trails and waypoints, to let you author and publish trail content, to authenticate your account, to keep your work saved, and to detect and prevent abuse. We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

AI processing

Suburb Historian uses Anthropic’s Claude API to help research, draft, and review trail narratives, and to evaluate candidate photos. Text and images you’re working on may be sent to Anthropic’s API for this purpose. We don’t use your content to train our own models, and processing is subject to Anthropic’s own API data-handling terms.

Analytics

We use PostHog to understand how people use Story Trail — page views, feature use, and which parts of the walking and authoring experience are working. On the web (this site, the walking app, and Suburb Historian) this includes session recordings: a replay of on-screen activity like clicks and navigation, which helps us spot confusing flows and fix bugs. If you’re signed in, this activity is linked to your account rather than staying anonymous. Analytics data may follow you across storytrail.app and its subdomains so we can see a single journey rather than disconnected visits. The iPhone and Android apps send usage events (for example, starting or finishing a trail), linked to your account when you’re signed in, but they don’t make session recordings. We use this to improve the product, not for advertising, and we don’t sell it.

Where your data is stored

Application data is stored in a PostgreSQL database (via Supabase) and uploaded photos and files in Amazon S3, with the apps themselves hosted on Amazon Web Services. Depending on the service, this may mean your information is processed on servers outside Australia. We use service providers that are contractually required to protect your data and use it only to provide their service to us.

Service providers we rely on include: Clerk (authentication), Supabase (database), Amazon Web Services (hosting and file storage), Anthropic (AI processing), Google (ARCore, for AR positioning in the Android app), Apple (ARKit, for AR positioning in the iPhone app), PostHog (product analytics and session recordings), Resend (transactional email), and search/image APIs used during trail research (Tavily, Flickr, Trove, Wikimedia Commons, and Google Images via Serper).

Children’s privacy

Story Trail is built with families in mind — it’s common for a parent and child to use the walking app together. We don’t knowingly collect personal information directly from children; the account holder is expected to be an adult, and a parent or guardian is expected to supervise a child’s use of the app. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information without appropriate parental involvement, contact us and we’ll delete it.

Data retention and deletion

We keep your account and content for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account at any time from Profile in the iPhone or Android app, or ask us to delete your account and associated personal data by contacting us below; published trail content that other organisations or authors have contributed to may be retained or reassigned rather than deleted outright, but your personal account information will be removed.

Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you. Contact hello@storytrail.app and we’ll respond as soon as we reasonably can.

Security

We rely on our service providers’ security practices (encryption in transit, access controls, and managed infrastructure) and follow reasonable practices of our own to protect your information. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we can’t guarantee absolute security.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, we’ll update the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the apps after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@storytrail.app.