Echobul Privacy Policy

1. Using Echobul without an account

The free walk needs no account. Without an account, your progress and downloaded walks stay on your phone and nothing about you is stored on our server.

2. Signing in with Google

You can sign in with your Google account to keep your pass and your progress on any phone. Google tells us your name, email address and a Google account identifier; we never see your Google password. We store these with your language choice.

With an account we also store your tour progress (which stops you heard or skipped, when you started a walk and how far you walked during it), the ratings and comments you give to walks, and reports of wrong information you send about a stop.

3. Location

Your location is used on your phone: to start a story when you reach a stop and to show where you are on the map. While a walk is running, Android shows a notification because the app follows your location with the screen off. We do not store your location history on our server.

When you ask for walking directions to the next stop, only the start and end points are sent to our server, which passes them, without saying who you are, to a routing service (openrouteservice.org) and does not store them.

4. Anonymous walk measurements

So that stories start at the right moment, the app sends our server a few anonymous facts about each walk: which walk and stop, whether a story started by itself or you tapped "I'm here, tell me", how far you were from the stop and how accurate your phone's location was at that moment, which stops you skipped, how the walk ended (stops heard, distance walked, time taken), and the first line of an error if the app fails.

Each walk gets a new random identifier. These measurements contain no coordinates, no account and no device identifier, are sent without your sign-in, and we do not store your IP address with them. We keep them for 180 days.

5. Purchases

An Echo Pass opens every walk for the number of days you choose (1 to 60). It is a single payment: nothing renews and you are never charged again. Google Play takes the payment; your card details never reach us.

When you buy or restore a pass, the app sends the store's purchase token and product identifier to our server, which asks Google Play whether the purchase is valid and records the product, order number, state and the date the pass ends. A purchase opens one account only.

6. Who processes data for us

Hetzner Online (Germany) hosts our server and database. Cloudflare protects connections to it. Google provides sign-in and Google Play purchases. GoDaddy provides our email, used when you write to us. Your phone loads map images from OpenFreeMap and photos from Wikimedia Commons directly, so they see your IP address.

7. Keeping and deleting

We keep your data while you have an account. Delete it at any time in the app under Profile → Delete account, or follow the steps on the Echobul account deletion page if you cannot use the app. Deletion is immediate and permanently removes your account, progress, ratings, comments and our purchase records. Reports of wrong information may remain without your name. Google keeps its own purchase records under its rules. Server backups that may still contain deleted data are overwritten within 14 days.

8. Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, its correction or deletion, and object to its use. Write to contact@owl-app.com. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).

9. Children

Echobul is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their data.