Cookies & Storage

What is kept on your device, and what we don't do

Last updated 17 August 2026

The short version

Travelogue sets no advertising cookies, uses no cross-site tracking, and has no third-party advertising or analytics in it.

What it does store on your device is your diary and your settings, because otherwise the app would be empty every time you opened it.

This page is called "Cookies" because that is what people look for. Strictly, the app uses no cookies at all — it uses your device's own storage. The law here (the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) covers storing things on your device generally, not just cookies, so the rules are the same either way.

What Travelogue stores on your device

YOUR DIARY AND SETTINGS. Your reviews, photos, passport, bucket list, goals, map colours and interface language, kept in the app's own storage under a single entry so the app can show them again next time.

WHETHER YOU ARE SIGNED IN, so you are not asked every time you open the app.

SOME SMALL PIECES OF STATE, such as which reviews you have already opened, so a friend's new entry can carry an unread mark.

All of this is strictly necessary for the app to do what you asked it to do, so we do not ask permission for it — the law does not require consent for storage that is essential to a service you have requested. It never leaves your device unless you switch on sync.

Deleting the app, or clearing its data in your device settings, removes all of it.

On the web version

The web version stores exactly the same things, in your browser's local storage rather than in a cookie. It is essential in the same way and for the same reasons: without it you would be signed out and your diary would not load.

No analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party cookies of any kind are set.

Clearing site data for Travelogue in your browser settings removes it, and signs you out.

The four categories, and which we use

STRICTLY NECESSARY — needed for the app to work at all: signing in, remembering your diary and settings. WE USE THESE. They cannot be switched off without breaking the app, and they do not require your consent.

PERFORMANCE AND ANALYTICS — measuring how people use a product. WE DO NOT USE THESE. There is no analytics package in Travelogue. If crash reporting is added, it will be opt-in and off until you say otherwise, and it is described below.

FUNCTIONALITY — remembering preferences such as language or region. WE USE THESE, as part of your settings, and they never leave your device unless you sync.

TARGETING AND ADVERTISING — building a profile to select advertising, usually shared across sites. WE DO NOT USE THESE, anywhere, in any form. There is no advertising in Travelogue and no advertising identifier is read or stored.

Crash and error reporting

Automatic crash reporting is planned and is not switched on in this build.

When it arrives it will be OPT-IN. It will be off until you turn it on, you will be asked plainly rather than through a pre-ticked box, and refusing will not reduce what the app can do. That is deliberate: error reporting is not strictly necessary to give you a travel diary, so it is a consent question and not merely a wording one.

If you do turn it on, a report contains what the app was doing when it failed, the app version, and your device model and operating system version. It does not contain your diary, your photographs or the text of your reviews.

Services the app contacts

Travelogue is built to work offline, and nothing is fetched when you launch it. Almost everything it shows — the map, country facts, climate figures, a whole-world satellite image, and tens of thousands of place names — is built into the app itself. Zooming a long way into the map fetches sharper satellite imagery, which is the one thing that looks better with a connection than without; everything else is the same either way.

There are four things it fetches from the internet in normal use, and none of them happens unless you do something first. All four are questions about a place on the map, answered with information anybody could look up, and none of them is told who you are:

EXCHANGE RATES from Frankfurter, and A WEATHER FORECAST from Open-Meteo, both when you open a country. They are told which country you tapped and nothing else. Neither needs an account or a key. If you never open a country's details, neither is ever contacted.

SATELLITE MAP IMAGERY from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services, but only while you are zoomed far enough into the map and only if you have chosen satellite as a map fill. What it receives is a rectangle of the earth — a zoom level and a grid reference — and nothing else at all: not where you have been, not what you have written, not which of those squares is yours. The app already carries a whole-world satellite image inside it, and that one is used whenever these are not available, so the map still works with no signal. No account and no key.

A PLACE-NAME LOOKUP from Open-Meteo, while you are typing a place into an entry. It receives the letters you have typed into that one field, and nothing else: not the entry, not its title, dates, photographs or rating, and nothing identifying you or your device beyond the address the request came from. It is a search for a place name — the same question as looking one up in an atlas — which is why it is not treated as part of your diary leaving the phone. It is never contacted if you pick a place the app already knew, which is most of them, and never if you are offline.

As with any internet request, all three see the IP address the request came from. We do not ask you to consent to any of them, because there is nothing of yours in them, and a consent screen for a question about the weather teaches people to tap through consent screens without reading them.

If you use Premium flight tracking, a flight number and date go to a flight-data provider through our own server, so the provider never sees your device's address.

Your choices

You can clear everything Travelogue has stored at any time, through your device's app settings or your browser's site settings. It signs you out and removes the locally stored diary, so export first if you want to keep it.

You can block storage entirely in a browser, but the web version will not work — it would have nowhere to keep your diary between page loads.

Because there is no advertising and no cross-site tracking in Travelogue, there is nothing here to opt out of beyond the above. We would rather have nothing for you to switch off than a long list of switches.