Privacy at 197
197 is a travel passport and community operated by Gökhan Yıldırım. This notice explains the data used by the current app.
What 197 stores
Your account email, profile details, the countries you mark in your passport and the visits you keep of them (when you were there, the cities and a note), travel statistics, journal entries, your trips (their stops, dates, the travelers on them, notes and checklist, and whether you show a trip on 197), your Travel Kit (a trip, its checklist, private notes and saved places; the photos in its notes stay on your phone), posts, photos, comments, likes, saves and follows, the travelers you block or mute, when you confirmed you are 13 or older and agreed to the community guidelines, and the private messages you send to other travelers. A private message can be read only by you and the traveler you wrote to; it is not end-to-end encrypted, and 197 reads a message only when one of you reports it, or when a first message from someone you don't follow, sent before you answer, holds words that often mean spam. If you tell 197 which passport you travel on, that country is stored with your profile; it is optional, you can clear it in Edit profile, and it is not a nationality record. Location is information you choose to add to your profile or content; 197 does not continuously track your device location: when you ask, it reads your position once, while the app is open, to show you on the map; that reading is not stored or sent unless you add a place there. If you turn on Profile > Settings > Welcome me in a new country, each time you open 197 it reads your position the same way, at most once and at about a kilometre's accuracy, only to tell which country you are in and offer its stamp. Your position is not stored or sent; only this phone keeps which countries it welcomed you to in the last 30 days, and forgets them when you turn it off. If you ask 197 to find your countries in your photos, it reads where and when each photo was taken, on this phone: in the photos you pick or, when you tap Scan my photo library and iOS lets 197 see your photos, in every photo it may see. No photo, and no place a photo was taken, is sent to 197; only the countries and days you confirm are saved, as when you mark them yourself. We also keep the language you use the app in, the notification token of a phone on which you allow notifications, and crash reports, which hold the error's text with email addresses taken out, the screen it happened on, the versions of 197 and of the phone's software, and a random number for this installation — never your account, name or email. If you enable Walking Distance, its current yearly total is cached only on your device. If you turn on daily counts, this phone adds to 197's daily totals once a day: whether 197 was opened that day, a country was stamped, your passport had at least 1, 3 or 10 countries, a story or question was posted, Explorer was opened, notifications were on or a 197 Unpacked card was shared, and whether it was the day you turned them on or 1, 7 or 30 days after it — never with your account, your name or any identifier.
How it is used
We use this information to provide your passport, sync your account, show the social features you choose to use, prevent abuse and operate the service. The passport you travel on chooses the cover the app opens on. Your passport, wish list, favorites and the passport you travel on also choose the country the app suggests you visit next, and stories from countries you have not been to yet come a little sooner in the Everyone feed. Daily totals, from the phones whose travelers turned them on, show how many travelers come back and which parts of 197 help people travel. We do not sell your personal information or use it for advertising across apps. 197 itself links to no hostel or booking service, is paid by none, and shares nothing about you with one.
What other travelers see
Your profile, travel count and content you publish can be visible to other signed-in travelers, who can find you by your name or @username, and among the travelers who have been to a country you stamped. Private account details, saved posts, wish lists and favorites are not shown as public profile information. A new account's first story with a photo or a video may be seen by a moderator before other travelers see it. A trip you choose to show on 197 shares only its route, with your profile: the countries and listed places, how you went between them, how many days it took and on which of them you reached each place, and, once that month is over, the month. Its name, the towns you typed, exact dates, photos, notes, checklist and the travelers with you stay private. Only a trip that is behind you and has no other travelers on it can be shown, and you can stop showing it at any time.
Who helps run 197
Account data and uploaded media are stored with Supabase, which also records the IP address and device description each signed-in session was made from. When an account is made, 197 keeps a salted hash of the internet address it came from (never the address itself) for 24 hours, so accounts cannot be made in bulk. Expo delivers notifications and app updates: it receives your phone's notification token and an installation identifier, and each time the app opens it asks Expo's update service for an update with a random identifier for this installation and, after a crash, the error's text. Apple provides Sign in with Apple and delivers notifications. Country photographs load from Wikimedia's servers, which see your phone's IP address. Apple draws the maps in the app, so the map requests your phone makes go to Apple, which handles them under its own privacy policy. Directions open in Apple Maps only when you tap them, with that place's coordinates and name. Access is limited by account-based database and storage rules. Daily counts reach Supabase with no account or session. Like any request, Supabase sees your phone's IP address and keeps it in its server logs for as long as those logs are kept; the daily totals never hold it. No internet service can promise absolute security, so only share content you are comfortable publishing.
Retention and deletion
We keep account data while your account is active and as needed to operate the service, resolve safety reports, or meet legal obligations. When you take every mark off a country in your Passport, we keep a record that you did and when for 90 days, so that another of your devices that was offline cannot mark it again; then it is deleted, and until then it is in your data download. A visit you remove is kept the same way for 90 days, but its dates, cities and note are deleted at once. When a photo or video is reported, a private copy of it is kept as evidence, even if it or your account is deleted: while the report is open, and for 180 days after a moderator acts on it. If every report on it is dismissed, the copy is deleted. Only 197's moderators can see it. Deleting a trip you show on 197, or your account, stops showing it at once. Deleting your account removes active account data and uploaded media, except reported photos and videos kept as evidence. Copies may remain for a short time in backups (see Backup copies), and where the law requires us to keep them. Crash reports older than 90 days are deleted. Daily totals are kept for two years. A day already added cannot be taken back out, because no total says which phones it came from. Turning daily counts off deletes at once the days this phone has not sent yet, and a day not sent within a week is deleted unsent.
Backup copies
So that 197 can be restored after a failure, an encrypted copy of its database (accounts, profiles, passports, stories, comments, private messages, reports and the rest of what this notice says 197 stores) is made every night and kept for 14 days. It is stored with GitHub, and may also be stored, for the same 14 days, with one cloud storage company the operator chooses. Photos and videos are copied about once a month to an encrypted disk the operator keeps, and a file deleted from 197 leaves that copy the next time it is made; photos and videos kept as evidence of a report are never copied. Only the operator opens these copies, and only to restore 197. So after you delete something, or your account, it can remain in a backup for up to 14 days, and a photo or a video until the next monthly copy.
Your data on this phone
So that 197 keeps working without a connection, it keeps a copy of some of your account on this phone, such as your passport, recent feeds, your conversations list, your journal and your Travel Kit. Signing out removes your account's private data from the phone: those copies, the photos in your Travel Kit notes (which are kept only here), the phone's registration for your notifications, and anything you did offline that has not reached your account yet. The app first tries to send that, and asks you before it removes anything it could not send. Your language, appearance, sound and daily counts settings stay.
Your choices
You can edit your profile, remove content, stop showing a trip on 197 from its page, unfollow, mute or block travelers, and report content. You can permanently delete your account from Profile > Settings. Account deletion removes your authentication account, database records and uploaded account media, except reported photos and videos kept as evidence (see Retention and deletion). On iPhone you can also download a copy of your data from Profile > Settings > Download my data: one file with your account details, profile, passport, visits, posts, comments, likes, saves, follows, journals, messages, blocks, mutes, reports, places, Travel Kit and your agreement to the community guidelines. Daily counts are off unless you turn them on, and you can turn them off at any time in Profile > Settings > Share daily counts.
Apple Health
Walking Distance is off by default. If you enable it, 197 reads Walking + Running Distance and GPS routes attached to walking or hiking workouts from Apple Health. Daily distance does not contain location. Walking Map only displays workouts that already include a saved GPS route. Health and route data stay on your device, are not uploaded to 197 or Supabase, are not shown to other travelers, and are never used for advertising. Turning the feature off deletes its cached total and clears routes from the app. You can also revoke Health access in iPhone Settings.
Age and children
197 is for travelers 13 and older, everywhere. Where the law of your country sets a higher age for agreeing on your own to how your data is used online, you need a parent's or guardian's consent to use 197 until you reach that age. 197 is not directed to children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 is using 197, tell us through the Support page. We look at the account, and when we find that it belongs to someone under 13, we delete it the way any account is deleted (see Retention and deletion).
Your rights, and who answers for your data
Gökhan Yıldırım is the data controller for 197: the person who decides how your data is used and answers for it, under Türkiye's Law on the Protection of Personal Data (KVKK, No. 6698), the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK GDPR. 197 uses your data to give you the service you signed up for, to keep travelers safe and stop abuse, and to meet legal duties; daily counts and Apple Health work only with your consent, which you can take back at any time in Settings. You have the right to know whether and how your data is used, for what, and who receives it, in your country or abroad; to get a copy of it (Download my data, or ask us); to have it corrected or deleted; to object to its use or have it restricted; to take it to another service; to withdraw your consent; and to ask for harm to be made good. Ask us through “Privacy questions” at the end of this notice: we answer within 30 days, free of charge. You can also complain to a data protection authority: in Türkiye the Personal Data Protection Board (KVKK), in the EU or the UK the authority where you live or work. Your data is stored and processed outside Türkiye, with the companies named in “Who helps run 197” and “Backup copies”.
Changes to this notice
We may update this notice when the app or the way it uses data changes. The date at the top changes when we do.