Phone AtlasPrivacy policy
Summary
Phone Atlas has no account and no servers of its own. It does not collect, sell or share your personal data. Your data lives in a database on your iPhone.
What stays on your iPhone
People, their numbers and number history, notes, groups, places, events and replies, reminders, money records and rates, trips, birthdays, how you met, and where you met someone (map coordinates). All of it is stored in the app's own database on your iPhone.
Permissions
iOS asks before Phone Atlas can use any of these. You can change your answer at any time in Settings.
Contacts
Phone Atlas reads your contacts to show your people. Emails, addresses and company names are read only as clues to which country a number belongs to. It writes to iPhone Contacts only when you act: when you add a new person (on by default, with a switch on the add screen), and when you undo adding that person, which removes the contact it created. Clean up fixes and merges are saved in Phone Atlas only and do not change iPhone Contacts. From Backup you can save a contacts safety copy (.vcf) of all your iPhone contacts to a place you choose.
Calendar
Adding an event opens Apple's New Event screen, where you choose the calendar and save. If you open Calendars in the app and allow access, it lists your calendars so you can pick a default. It does not read your events.
Location
Location is used only while you are using the app, in two places.
When you add someone with the "Where we met" switch on (it is on by default), the app saves the map coordinates on your iPhone and looks up a place name with the geocoder built into iOS. What Apple receives is covered by Apple's privacy policy.
At launch, if you have already allowed location, the app sets your home city to the nearest city in its built-in list, unless you picked a home city yourself. You can also tap to use your location when choosing your home city. For your home city, only the city is kept, not the coordinates.
Notifications
Birthday alerts, reminders you set and trip reminders are scheduled on your iPhone as local notifications. Nothing is pushed from a server.
When the app uses the internet
The app fetches public data about places from the services below. Results are cached on your iPhone.
| Service | Host | What it receives | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frankfurter | api.frankfurter.dev | Two currency codes | Exchange rates |
| ExchangeRate-API | open.er-api.com | One currency code | Rates when Frankfurter is down |
| MET Norway | api.met.no | Coordinates of a city from the app's built-in list (a city you or your people are linked to, a Fly Me city, or a capital), to 4 decimals | Weather |
| The GDELT Project | api.gdeltproject.org | A country name | News headlines |
| National news feeds | www.abc.net.au, en.antaranews.com, www.thehindu.com, economynext.com, kathmandupost.com, www.rappler.com, www.dawn.com, www.bangkokpost.com, e.vnexpress.net | The feed address, which identifies the country | News when GDELT is unavailable |
| Smartraveller (Australian Government) | www.smartraveller.gov.au | A request for its list of destinations | Travel advice |
| USGS | earthquake.usgs.gov | A request for this week's list of earthquakes | Earthquakes |
| World Bank | api.worldbank.org | A country code | GDP |
The countries and cities the app asks about are the ones you and your people are linked to, so a data service could infer which countries you look up. It never receives names, numbers or notes. Every request carries your device's internet address, as all internet requests do, and a label naming the app: PhoneAtlas/0.1 (github.com/devkindhq/friends-crm), or PhoneAtlas/0.1 (phone-atlas) for Smartraveller.
Maps
The map uses Apple Maps. Map tiles are loaded from Apple. What Apple receives is covered by Apple's privacy policy.
When you leave the app
These open another app or Safari, whose own policy applies: a phone call, Messages, WhatsApp (wa.me), Telegram (t.me), Apple Maps (maps.apple.com), and news, travel advice, earthquake and Credits links in Safari. Sharing uses the iOS share sheet, and you choose where it goes.
Backups
You can export a full backup, your people as contacts (.vcf) or a spreadsheet (.csv), and choose where to save it. It is not sent to us. The backup file is not encrypted and contains everything in the app, including where-you-met locations. Keep it somewhere private. Automatic iCloud backup and password-protected exports are not available yet. Before a restore, the app keeps a copy of what was there on your iPhone, so you can undo the last restore.
No tracking
No analytics, advertising or crash-reporting tools. No account. We cannot see who uses the app.
Deleting your data
Delete the app to remove its database from your iPhone. Events you added to Calendar and contacts you created in iPhone Contacts stay. Exported backup files stay wherever you saved them.
Children
The app is not directed at children.
This website
This website uses no cookies, analytics or third-party scripts. It is hosted on Cloudflare, which may keep standard server logs.
Changes and contact
Changes to this policy are posted here with a new date.
Email: ios@devkind.com.au
See also Support.