Privacy policy
Last updated 9 October 2026
Reckon is a place to keep your own travel recommendations and share them with people you know. This page says what we collect, what we do with it, who else sees it, and how to delete it.
The short version. We collect what you give us to run your account and your books. We don't sell it, we don't show ads, and we don't track you across other apps or websites. There are no analytics or advertising tools in the app. Your profile starts private. You can delete your account, and everything in it, from Settings in the app.
What we collect
Your account
- Your email address, name and username.
- Your password, stored only as a one-way hash. Nobody, including us, can read it back.
- Your profile picture, if you add one, and how you framed it.
- Your privacy setting (private or public).
What you add
- Your books: the city or country each one is about, how you know it (for example "lived here 2019 to 2022"), and your notes and tips.
- Your recs: the place, your note, rating, tags, and whether you've been.
- Your photos. Before we store a photo we remove any location saved inside the file. A photo whose location can't be removed is refused rather than stored.
People
- Your friends and friend requests.
- The invite codes you create, the note you add to each, and who used them.
- People you block, and reports you make about content or people.
- Your answers to polls in the app, including anything you write in. Other people see only how many chose each answer.
Keeping you signed in
- A session record for each device you sign in on: when it was created and last used, and the name your browser or app gives itself. On your phone, the session is kept in the iOS Keychain.
We don't collect your contacts, your precise location history, or anything from your photo library that you haven't picked yourself.
Your location
When you add a rec, the app can use your phone's location to suggest which of your books you're adding it to. That check happens on your phone. Your location isn't sent to us. You can say no to location access and pick the book yourself.
Adding recs from your photos
"Add from photos" turns the photos you pick into suggested recs. This is the one feature that shares information with other companies, so here is exactly what happens:
- On your phone: the app reads the time each photo was taken and where. It uses that to group your photos into visits. Nothing is uploaded at this step.
- To Google, through our server: the centre point of each visit (a map coordinate, not a photo) is sent to Google Maps to find the places nearby, and, for photos taken far from all of your books, the name of the town they were taken in. When the photo reading below can't settle which place it was, what it saw is searched for near that point too.
- To Anthropic, through our server: up to three small copies of a visit's photos are sent to Anthropic's Claude AI to read signs and work out which place it was. Before they leave our server, every photo has its location and other hidden details removed. Along with them go the name of the book's city, the rough local time the photos were taken, and the names of the nearby places Google suggested.
- What's kept: we don't keep those copies. Anthropic doesn't use them to train its models and deletes them from its systems within 30 days, unless they break Anthropic's usage policy. Google handles what it receives under its own privacy policy.
- Nothing is saved to your book until you choose to add a suggested rec. If the photo reading isn't available, the import still works and suggests places by distance alone.
Searching for a place
When you type a place's name while adding a rec or making a book, what you type is sent through our server to Google Maps to suggest matches, along with the book's city so nearby results come first. The name, address, map location and website of the place you pick come from Google and are stored as a shared place record (see below).
Who can see what
- Private profile (the default): only your Reckon friends can see your books, recs and photos.
- Public profile: anyone with the link can read your public books and recs, including on the website without signing in.
- Always visible: your name, username, profile picture and the number of books, recs and friends you have. People can find you by name or username when they search. Only your friends can see who your friends are.
- Your friends see what you add in their feed.
- Blocking someone hides you from each other inside Reckon. It can't stop anyone reading a public profile on the website while signed out.
Shared place records
A rec is your opinion about a place. The place itself (its name, address and map location) is a shared record that other people's recs can point to as well. A place record holds no personal information and isn't tied to your account, so it stays when you delete a rec or your account.
Who we share it with
We don't sell your information or share it for advertising. We use these companies to run Reckon, and they only get what they need for that job:
- Cloudflare hosts Reckon: the servers, the database and photo storage. Like any web host, it processes your IP address to deliver pages and to limit repeated login attempts. We don't store your IP address.
- Google Maps suggests places, as described above.
- Anthropic reads photos in "Add from photos", as described above.
- Apple draws the maps in the iOS app. On the website, map tiles come from CARTO and the fonts from Google Fonts and Fontshare, which see your IP address when your browser fetches them.
Each of these companies is bound by its own terms and privacy commitments to protect the data it handles for us at least as well as this policy does. We'll also share information if the law requires it.
How long we keep it, and deleting it
- We keep your information for as long as you have an account.
- Delete a rec, a photo or a book and it's gone, photo files included.
- Delete your account from Settings in the app. That immediately deletes your account, books, recs, photos, friendships, friend requests, invites, blocks and sessions. Your username becomes free for someone else to use.
- Copies can remain in our database backups for up to 30 days before they are overwritten.
- If you reported something, or someone reported you, we keep the report and a copy of what was reported, so we can deal with abuse even after an account is deleted.
You can also ask us for a copy of your information, to correct it, or to delete it, by contacting us.
Children
Reckon isn't for children under 13 and we don't knowingly collect information from them. If you think a child has an account, tell us and we'll delete it.
Changes
If we change this policy we'll update this page and the date at the top. If a change affects what we share or with whom, we'll let you know before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions or requests about your data: see Contact.