1. Who we are
The app and this site are developed and operated by Proxigem (the developer named on the app's store listings), reachable at privacy@proxigem.com (the address also listed on the app's store pages). For anything in this policy — questions, complaints, deletion requests — email us there.
2. What the app does with your location
Proxigem's whole purpose is to answer "what notable places are around me?". To do that it uses your device's location (GPS) and compass. This happens entirely on your device:
- The app ships with an offline database of places and compares your coordinates against it locally.
- Your location is not sent to our servers to produce the nearby list, is not stored beyond what the screen needs, and no movement history is kept.
- Location permission is optional: on any platform you can instead open the map view and tap a point to browse places there — but without location the "what's around me" list cannot work.
3. When the app talks to our server
The app works fully offline. It contacts proxigem.com only for these optional features, and fails
quietly back to offline behaviour if the network is unavailable:
| Request | What it contains | What we can infer |
|---|---|---|
Update check (/manifest) |
No location, no identifiers — just the request itself. | That some device checked for updates. |
Region pack download (/packs/…) |
The name of the regional data pack your app selected (e.g. the Australia pack). The choice of pack is made on your device; your coordinates are not sent. | Coarse, country/state-level interest — nothing finer. |
Place detail refresh (/poi/{id}) |
The ID of the place you opened, so we can return a fresher description. | That someone viewed that place's entry. |
Rating submission (POST /poi/{id}/rating) |
The place's ID, your 1–5 stars, and the anonymous installation identifier (§4). Only sent when you tap the stars. | That some installation rated that place. Not who. |
Server logs
Like any web service, our API keeps a technical request log for abuse prevention (rate limiting) and service statistics. It is deliberately built to hold no directly identifying data:
- Your IP address is stored only as a salted one-way hash (SHA-256). The raw address is not written to our application log and cannot be recovered from the hash.
- Rate limiting uses short-lived counters keyed by a hash; they expire within minutes and store no address.
- The log records: timestamp, the route requested, response status and timing, user-agent string, and — for API calls that explicitly include them (see §7) — query coordinates.
- Our hosting provider's standard web-server logs (TLS termination, access logs) may hold raw IP addresses for a limited period under the provider's own policy, as with virtually every website.
- The site's operator-only admin page records failed sign-in attempts using the same salted hash scheme (no raw address), solely to lock out password guessing; entries expire within about 30 minutes.
4. Place ratings (the community feature)
You can rate places 1–5 stars. This is entirely optional, and before your first rating the app asks you to explicitly accept the Terms of Use and this policy. When you rate:
- To stop the same person rating a place twice, the app generates a random installation identifier (a UUID) on your device and submits it with each rating. This identifier is random — it is not your name, email, phone number, advertising ID, or account (Proxigem has no accounts) — and we cannot connect it to you. It never appears in URLs, server responses, or our request log.
- Our server stores the rating against that identifier and the place, plus the same salted one-way hash of your IP address used by the request log (§3) — solely to rate-limit abuse (ballot stuffing), never to identify you.
- Only the aggregate (average stars and count) is ever shown to other users; individual ratings are not published. That aggregate is also bundled into the downloadable offline data packs so average stars show without a connection — again the average and count only, never who rated. To keep the shown average reasonably fresh without chatty requests, the app re-fetches it at most about once a month per place (and remembers the result on your device).
- Your own ratings are remembered on your device so the app can show them back to you.
- Uninstalling the app (or clearing its data) discards the identifier permanently. You can also email us to have your ratings deleted: the app shows your identifier under menu → My rating identifier (with a copy button) — include it in your email and we delete every rating stored against it. If you no longer have the app, ask us to delete by date/place instead and we'll do what the data allows.
5. Third-party services the app fetches from
- Wikimedia (place photos): when you open a place's details online, its photo is loaded from Wikimedia Commons servers. Wikimedia then sees your IP address and which image was requested, under the Wikimedia privacy policy.
- OpenStreetMap (map tiles): the map view (mobile and desktop) loads its base-map tiles from openstreetmap.org, which sees your IP address and the map area you view, under the OSMF privacy policy.
- Links you tap: opening a place's Wikipedia article or a web search hands over to your browser; from that point the destination site's policy applies.
No third-party SDK runs inside the app: there is no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting service, and no social login.
6. The website contact form
The contact form on proxigem.com asks for your email address, an optional name, and your message. Submitting it sends that content as a single email to our support inbox (and a copy to the operator) so we can read and answer you — nothing you type is stored in a database on our server; the email is the only copy. Your address is used solely to reply and is never added to any mailing list. To limit abuse, the server keeps a short-lived, salted hash of the sender's IP address (the same no-raw-IP scheme as §3) counting recent submissions; it cannot be reversed to your address and expires within the hour. If you'd rather skip the form, email support@proxigem.com directly.
7. Features under development
The following features are planned. They are described here now so the policy stays ahead of the app; each will only apply from the version that ships it, and this policy will be updated if their design changes.
Online place checks (e.g. live offers & vouchers)
Some future content — such as merchant vouchers — only makes sense live, so the app will ask our server "what's available near these coordinates?". That request necessarily includes your current coordinates. We record the queried coordinates to understand where demand is, but deliberately without any user identifier: they are not linked to the ratings identifier above, to an account, or to your IP address (which is only ever stored hashed, per §3). They tell us where a lookup happened, never who made it.
Visited-places history
You'll be able to keep a personal record of places you've been near or visited. This history is stored on your device only. If we later offer an optional cloud backup of it, that backup will be strictly opt-in, encrypted in transit, tied only to the same anonymous installation identifier, and deletable — both from the app and by emailing us. Until such a feature ships, your visit history never leaves your device.
Paid upgrades
If paid features are introduced, payment will be handled entirely by the app store (Google Play / Apple). We never receive your card details; the store shares with us only the anonymised purchase record needed to unlock the feature.
8. What we never do
- No selling, renting, or sharing of personal data with data brokers or advertisers — ever.
- No advertising or cross-app tracking identifiers.
- No background location collection and no location history on our servers.
- No accounts, passwords, or contact lists.
9. Data retention & your rights
- On-device data (the offline database, downloaded packs, settings and — when it ships — visit history) is yours: delete it any time by clearing the app's data or uninstalling.
- Server logs contain no raw identifiers (§3) and are kept only for operating and protecting the service.
- Depending on where you live (e.g. GDPR in the EU/UK, CCPA in California, the Australian Privacy Act), you may have rights of access, correction, deletion and objection. Because we hold nothing tied to your identity, most requests are satisfied already — but email us and we'll do whatever the data allows: privacy@proxigem.com.
10. Children
Proxigem is a general-audience app. It is not directed at children, has no accounts or social features, and collects no personal information from anyone, children included.
11. Security
All traffic between the app and proxigem.com uses HTTPS. Server-side, identifying values are hashed before storage (§3), the API is read-only against the place database, and access logs are not web-accessible.
12. Changes to this policy
When the app gains one of the features in §7 — or anything else that changes data handling — this page will be updated before or with the release, with the effective date above revised. Material changes will also be noted in the app's release notes.