Privacy Policy
Last updated 4 September 2026
There is no account, and the places you keep stay in your own browser. KeptAtlas has nothing to sign up for. Your places, your notes, your years and your voice recordings are saved on the device you made them on, and we never receive them. We do not sell anything, we do not show ads, and we do not track you between visits.
What we collect about you
Nothing you type or keep. There is no account to make and no form to fill in. We never ask for your name, your email, your phone number or your age. There is no server on our side holding an atlas, so there is nothing of yours for us to look at, lose or hand over.
The one exception is honest and small, and it is described under error reports below. It never contains anything about you or your places.
Where your atlas actually lives
Everything you keep is written to your browser's own storage on the device in front of you. In plain terms, that is the same place a website remembers you are logged in, and it never leaves the machine unless you copy it out yourself. Specifically:
- Your places, notes and years are saved in your browser's local storage.
- Your voice recordings are larger, so they are saved in your browser's local database instead. One recording per place, and the newest one wins.
- Your settings live in the same place. Which view of Earth you prefer, whether you have seen the opening, and whether you have been shown how to walk.
Clearing your browser's data for this site deletes all of it for good, and we cannot restore it, because we never had a copy. The app has a Save a copy button so you can keep a backup file yourself, and a Bring a copy back button to load one in. Those files go where you tell your device to put them, and they never pass through us.
Error reports, the one thing that leaves
When something in the app breaks, it sends us a short report so we can fix it. That report contains the app's name, which build you were running, the error message, and the technical trace of where in the code it happened. It carries no places, no notes, no addresses, no audio and nothing that identifies you. It is capped at twenty reports per visit and it is switched off entirely when the app is run locally by a developer.
Street imagery is rented, and never kept
The street views you walk through belong to their owners and are shown to you live, in the moment you ask for them. The app never screenshots, copies, caches or redraws them, and nothing you look at is stored on our side. This is a rule the app is built around rather than a promise laid over the top of it, and it is why keepsakes are made only from things we do own, which means your own words and voice, and our own drawing of the globe.
Sharing a place
Nothing is public by default and there is no feed of anybody's home. If you choose to share a place, the card that is made names the city, and never a house number and never coordinates. What you do with that card afterwards is up to you, and the app shows you exactly what it looks like before anything is sent.
Other services the app talks to
KeptAtlas is a map of the whole world, so it asks other people's services for the world. Each one sees only the request needed to answer, such as a place name or a set of coordinates, and none of them are told who you are, because we do not know either. They are:
- Google Street View, for the street imagery you stand in and walk through.
- Esri World Imagery, for the view from above.
- NASA EPIC, for the real photographs of Earth from space.
- OpenStreetMap and its Nominatim service, for turning an address into a point on Earth and back again.
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, for the story of a place and for archive photographs of places that have changed.
- Open-Meteo, for the weather on the street you are standing on.
- Google Fonts, for the typefaces, and unpkg, for the mapping library.
- Internet radio stations, when you choose to listen to somewhere. Your browser connects to that station directly.
Each of these has its own privacy policy, and we have no control over and no visibility into what they log at their end.
Your microphone, in two different ways
Your browser always asks permission first, and the app works completely without it.
Recording a voice note is entirely on your device. The audio is saved straight into your browser's local database and is never uploaded to us or to anyone else. If you leave in the middle of recording, the half-finished take is thrown away rather than kept.
Speaking an address instead of typing it uses your browser's own speech recognition. This one is important to understand: most browsers do that transcription on their own servers, which means the audio of what you said is sent to your browser's maker, not to us. If you would rather that never happen, type the address instead and the microphone is never touched.
Children
KeptAtlas is not aimed at children and collects nothing from anybody, so there is nothing for us to knowingly collect from a child. There are no accounts, no messaging and no way for one person using the app to reach another.
Your rights
Because everything is on your own device, you already have complete control. You can look at everything you have kept inside the app, change or delete any of it, export the whole thing to a file, or clear the site's data and erase all of it at once. There is no request to make of us, and no account to close. If you have written to us by email and want that deleted, ask and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change ever means something of yours would start leaving your device, we will say so plainly rather than quietly widening a sentence.