What we collect
Your location. While a run or a tour is active the app reads your precise location, including in the background so the tour keeps working with your phone in a pocket and the screen off. Those coordinates, your speed and your course are sent to our servers to work out which landmarks lie ahead of you and to write and fetch the narration for them. Location is read only while a tour is running; stop the tour and it stops.
Your voice, on the phone only. "Ask the guide" can take a spoken question. If you use it, the app uses the microphone and Apple's on-device speech recognition to turn speech into text. The recording stays on your device — only the resulting text leaves it.
Your account. An email address and password, or Sign in with Apple. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we only ever see Apple's relay address.
What you have listened to and where you have been. Which landmarks were narrated to you, when, the tours you have run and the badges you have earned. This is what drives your history, your badges and the leaderboard.
Walks you choose to publish. If you publish a walk, a trimmed version of its GPS route plus the landmark timestamps becomes visible to other U-tour users. Publishing is never automatic. You can unshare a walk at any time, which removes it from other people's view.
How we use it
- To pick the landmarks in front of you and to write, fetch and speak their stories.
- To answer questions you ask the guide.
- To keep your listening history, badges and leaderboard standing.
- To show walks you have published to other users, and to show you theirs.
- To keep the service running — caching narration so the same landmark isn't rewritten for every runner, and diagnosing faults.
We do not sell your data, we do not share it with advertisers, and there is no advertising or analytics SDK in the app.
AI: how the narration is written
U-tour's narration, its area briefings and its "Ask the guide" answers are generated by Anthropic's Claude models. They are machine-written, which means they can be wrong. Treat them as a tour guide's patter, not as a reference work — and never as navigation, safety or medical advice.
When you ask the guide a question, what is sent to Anthropic is: your typed or dictated question, two snapshots of your recent location, what the tour has been narrating to you, and your narration preferences. Anthropic may run a web search on your question in order to answer it. Anthropic processes this on our behalf as a service provider.
The spoken voice is synthesised by ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs receives only the generated narration text — never your voice, your location or your account. The resulting audio is cached in a public storage bucket so the next runner past the same landmark doesn't pay for it again; that bucket holds machine-generated narration only, never anything about you.
Reference lookups
To find out what is actually on the street, the servers query Wikipedia and Wikidata, the OpenStreetMap Overpass API, and Open-Meteo for local weather. These services receive the coordinates of the area being looked up and nothing else — no account, no identifier, nothing that says the request is yours.
Where it is stored, and who processes it
- Supabase — hosts our database, authentication and file storage. Your account, history, badges and published walks live here.
- Anthropic — generates narration, briefings and answers, as described above.
- ElevenLabs — turns the generated text into speech.
- Apple — App Store and TestFlight distribution, and Sign in with Apple if you use it. Speech recognition runs on your device.
- Netlify — hosts this website. Netlify's servers see the usual web request data (IP address, browser) for the pages you load here.
- Google Fonts — this website loads two typefaces from Google's font servers, which see your IP address when it does. The app itself does not.
Cookies
This website sets no cookies. There is no analytics, no tag manager and no tracking pixel on it. The app stores your session on your own device so you stay signed in.
Retention
Your account, history and badges are kept until you delete your account. Published walks are kept until you unshare them or delete your account. Cached narration audio and landmark text are machine-generated and are kept indefinitely — they describe places, not people, and contain nothing about you.
Your choices, and deleting your data
- Location: iOS asks before the app can read it, and you can withdraw it any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services. Without it there is no tour.
- Microphone: only requested when you first dictate a question, and revocable the same way. Typing works without it.
- Unshare a walk: any published walk can be unshared from the app, which takes it out of other users' view.
- Delete your account: in the app, Settings → Delete account. This removes your account, your history, your badges and your published walks. It cannot be undone. You can also ask us to do it by emailing the address below.
Children
U-tour is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.
Changes
If this policy changes we will update this page and move the effective date at the top. Material changes will be flagged in the app.
Contact
U-tour is a Furman Studios venture. Questions, requests and deletions: hello@furmanstudios.com.