Privacy Policy, Always On Location

Last updated: 2026-08-10

Always On Location records where your phone has been, so you can geotag photos taken on a camera that has no GPS of its own. This document says exactly what it does with that record.

The short version: the app has no server, no account, and no analytics. It never uploads your location anywhere.

What is recorded

While you have granted location access, the app writes each position fix it receives from iOS to a plain CSV file, one file per local calendar day, in the app's own Documents folder. Each row holds the time (UTC and local), latitude, longitude, altitude, the accuracy of each of those, speed, course, your time zone, and which iOS mechanism produced the fix.

A second, disposable file in Application Support notes the minutes when the app was awake and looking for a fix but did not get one. It holds no positions.

That is the entire dataset. There is no identifier of you, your device, or your network in any of it.

Where it goes

Nowhere, unless you move it.

• The app contains no networking code for your data. It has no server to talk to, does not phone home, and contains no analytics, advertising, crash reporting, or third-party SDK of any kind.
• The files live in the app's container on your phone. Because file sharing is enabled, they also appear under Files → On My iPhone → Always On Location and in Finder when you plug the phone into a computer you have trusted. That is deliberate: it is what lets you recover your logs if the app ever stops launching. It also means anyone with your unlocked phone, or with a computer you have already trusted, can read them.
• If you choose an export folder in Settings, the app copies each finished day into that folder. If you point it at a cloud folder, your logs go to that provider under that provider's privacy policy. You choose the folder; the app never picks one for you.
• If you use the share sheet, the logs go wherever you send them.

iCloud Backup

If iCloud Backup is switched on for your phone, iOS includes this app's logs in that backup, as it does for most app data. The app does not upload them itself. This is your phone's backup of your own device, encrypted and held under Apple's privacy policy.

You can stop that in Settings → Storage in the app, which marks the log folder as excluded from device backups. Note the trade-off: excluded logs are not restored onto a new phone, so keep your own copy if you care about them.

Maps

The year, month and day screens draw your track on a map. Rendering a map means Apple's MapKit fetches map imagery for the region you are looking at, which is derived from where the phone has been. This is the one and only network traffic the app causes. It is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy; your log file is never part of it.

Deleting your data

• Swipe any day in a month's list to delete that day.
• Settings → Storage → Delete all logs erases the entire archive.
• Deleting the app removes everything it holds on the phone.

Copies you have already exported to a folder, sent through the share sheet, or that exist in an iCloud backup are outside the app's reach and must be deleted where they are.

Children

The app collects nothing and transmits nothing, and is not directed at children.

Changes

Any change to this policy is committed to the public repository, so its full history is visible alongside the code that implements it.

Where this lives

The current version of this policy is published at https://boteanu-consulting.gitlab.io/always-on-location/privacy/, and is generated from PRIVACY.md in the public repository.

Contact

Please open an issue on the public repository.