Privacy Policy

The controller under Article 4 (7) GDPR for both the Flatwhite iPhone app and getflatwhite.app is:

Felix Straub
Schanzenstraße 19
90478 Nürnberg
Germany

Email: felix@getflatwhite.app

Full provider identification is on the imprint page.

Location

Used while you have the app open, only to sort cafés by how far away they are. It is never sent anywhere.

Account

There is no Flatwhite account. No sign-in screen, no name, no email address, no password, not even an anonymous identifier. Syncing uses the Apple Account your iPhone is already signed in to.

Server

There is none either. The app makes no request of ours, because we run nothing for it to talk to.

Likes and collections

Sync through your own iCloud, so they are on your other devices too. They go to Apple, never to us - we have nowhere to put them.

Shared collections

Travel inside the link itself, up to 60 cafés per link. Nothing is stored for them.

Tracking

None. No analytics, no advertising identifier, no third-party tracking SDK.

Purchases

Handled by Apple. We never see your payment details.

The app asks for location access only while you are using it(“when in use”). It never asks for background or “always” access, and it does not run location updates while it is closed.

Your coordinates are used for exactly one thing: calculating the distance between you and each café so the list can be sorted nearest first. That calculation happens on your device, against a café list that is already stored inside the app.

Your location is not transmitted to us, not logged and not stored. The app sends us no requests at all, so there is none that could contain coordinates.

You can refuse the permission or withdraw it at any time in iOS Settings. The app keeps working; the list is then simply not sorted by distance. The legal basis is your consent, given through the iOS permission prompt (Article 6 (1) (a) GDPR, and § 25 (1) TDDG for the access to information on your device).

Flatwhite has no sign-in screen, and not because the sign-in is hidden: there is no Flatwhite account of any kind, not even an anonymous identifier generated in the background. The syncing described in section 5 runs on the Apple Account your iPhone is already signed in to - we neither see it nor learn that it exists. Nothing identifies your phone to us, because nothing of ours ever hears from it.

We operate no server for the app. It sends us no requests, so there is no traffic to log, no database to hold anything and no data to hand over, delete or lose.

Earlier builds were designed differently. Until the ratings feature was removed, the app signed you in anonymously with Supabase and published your reviews to a database in Frankfurt. That feature, that account and that dependency are all gone - the app ships with no third-party code at all - and the sections describing them were removed from this page rather than left standing.

The cafés you like and the collections you build are stored in the app’s database on your iPhone, and that database syncs through your own iCloud so the same list is on your iPad and on your next iPhone. Technically: SwiftData over a private CloudKit container, which is a corner of the iCloud storage that belongs to your Apple Account.

“Private” there is not a description, it is the storage class. The data goes to Apple, under your account, and Apple gives us no way to read it. It does not pass through anything of ours, because we run nothing for it to pass through.

If you are not signed in to iCloud, or you have iCloud switched off for Flatwhite, the app keeps the same data on the device alone and nothing syncs. Nothing is lost either way.

One consequence worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of what a local-only app does: removing the app no longer removes everything. The copy on the device goes with it; the copy in your iCloud stays until you delete it, under Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage. You can also empty a list inside the app before deleting it.

The one setting the app remembers - whether you have already seen the welcome screen - stays on the device and syncs nowhere. And if you have iPhone backups switched on, the app’s local data is in that backup like any other app’s. Both of those are between you and Apple; we have no access to either.

When you share a collection, its name, its colour and up to 60 place identifiers are encoded into the link itself. Nothing about it is stored on a server, which is why a shared link needs no account, never expires and cannot be revoked or counted.

Whoever holds the link holds the collection, so treat it like any other link you send. It contains no café names and nothing about you.

Opening such a link on the web renders the collection page on this site. See section 9 for what a web request logs.

Flatwhiteoffers a single one-time in-app purchase. It runs entirely through Apple’s StoreKit: Apple handles the payment, the receipt and the refund. We never receive your name, address, card or Apple Account details.

The app checks whether the purchase is active by asking iOS, on the device, each time it launches. It stores no purchase record of its own and sends none to our server. Apple’s own privacy policy applies to the transaction.

The café list is licensed from DataForSEO, whose business listings are derived from Google place data. We fetch that data ourselves, ahead of time, and ship the finished list inside the app.

This matters for your privacy: the app does not query DataForSEO, Google or any other data provider while you use it. Browsing cafés sends no request anywhere and reveals nothing about what you looked at.

Maps are drawn by Apple Maps, which is part of iOS. When a map is displayed, iOS contacts Apple to fetch map tiles under Apple’s own privacy policy - we neither receive nor control that traffic.

getflatwhite.app sets no cookies, embeds no fonts or scripts from third parties, and runs no analytics. There is nothing to consent to, which is why you were not asked.

Like every web server, the host records technical request data - IP address, time, requested path, referrer and browser user agent - to deliver pages and keep the service secure and stable. On a shared collection link the requested path contains the encoded collection. These logs are not used to build profiles and are not merged with app data. Legal basis: Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in operating the site securely.

⚠Hosting provider still to be named here - the site is not deployed yet, and the host that processes these logs must be the real one.

Apple

Distributes the app, processes purchases, provides Apple Maps, and stores your likes and collections in your own iCloud. Apple acts as its own controller for those; its privacy policy applies.

Apple is the whole list, and only for the app. Nobody processes data on our behalf, because there is nothing to process.

The app bundles no third-party code whatsoever: no analytics service, no crash reporting service, no advertising network, no social media SDK and no backend client - see section 13. The only other processor anywhere in this policy is the host of this website, in section 9, and it never sees anything the app does.

App data

Entirely up to you: it sits on your iPhone and in your own iCloud until you delete it there. We hold no copy and no retention period applies to us, because we hold nothing.

Server logs

Deleted or anonymised by the host on a short cycle.

Under the GDPR you have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and objection (Art. 21). Where processing rests on consent - the location permission - you may withdraw it at any time with effect for the future.

One practical consequence of building the app without accounts or a server: as far as the app is concerned we hold no personal data about you at all, so there is nothing for us to disclose, correct or erase. Article 11 (2) GDPR applies - we cannot identify you and are not required to acquire the means to. The rights above therefore bite on this website’s server logs (section 9) rather than on the app, and everything the app stores is already in your own hands: delete it in the app, remove the app, and clear its iCloud data in iOS Settings as described in section 5.

You may also lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. The one responsible for us is the Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA); you can equally approach the authority where you live or work.

Flatwhite contains no analytics or attribution SDK, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier (IDFA) and no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because there is nothing it would need to ask about. Your behaviour in the app is not measured, not profiled and not shared with anyone.

No automated decision-making or profiling within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR takes place.

Flatwhite is not aimed at children and collects no data about age - nor about anything else. There is no way for anyone, child or adult, to publish anything through the app, so there is nothing that could need removing.

If the app starts processing data differently - a new function, a new provider - this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to notify, so the date is the honest signal.