Privacy
The short version: we collect nothing about you.
Gorse has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party SDKs. There is no login, so there is nothing to log in to, and no profile of you anywhere. We could not tell you who uses Gorse if we tried.
What the app stores, and where
Your flags, your journal notes and any photos you add are saved on your iPhone. If you have iCloud switched on, they sync through your own private iCloud account so they turn up on your other devices. That is Apple's encrypted storage in your name, not ours - we have no server holding your data and no way to read what is in your iCloud.
Delete the app and the copy on that device goes with it. Remove Gorse from your iCloud storage settings and the synced copy goes too.
The only thing the app fetches
Gorse downloads the public catalogue of historic sites - names, locations, descriptions, opening details - from our content delivery network. Those requests are anonymous: they carry no identifier, no account and nothing about what you have flagged or looked at.
Like any web request, they reach our infrastructure provider's servers, which keep standard technical logs (an IP address, a timestamp, which file was asked for) briefly for security and reliability. We do not link those logs to you, do not build profiles from them, and do not pass them to anyone.
Permissions we ask for
- Location, while you are using the app. Used on your phone to show where you are on the map and to sort sites by how far away they are. It is never sent anywhere. Say no and everything still works - you can search and browse by name or county instead.
- Photos, only the ones you pick. Used when you attach a picture to a journal entry. We ask for a single photo at a time rather than your whole library. Say no and the journal works exactly as before, just with words.
Children
Gorse is fine for all ages and behaves the same for everyone, because it collects nothing from anyone.
Changes, and getting in touch
If this ever changes we will update this page and the date at the top before the change ships.