Privacy policy

VaykMode is operated as an independent personal project based in Washington, America. Anything in this policy, and any request about your own data, reaches us at privacy@vaykmode.com.

Google sign-in is the only way into VaykMode. There are no VaykMode passwords, which means there is no password of yours for us to store or lose.

When you sign in, Google passes us four things:

• the name on your Google account
• your email address
• the web address of your Google profile picture
• the account identifier Google uses to recognise you next time

Those are the basic sign-in details, and they are all we ask for. VaykMode does not request access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Photos or any other Google service, and so it cannot read any of them.

We keep the sign-in tokens Google issues, because that is how a return visit knows it is still you. They are never used to call any other Google service.

You can disconnect VaykMode at any time from the “Third-party apps & services” section of your Google account. That stops you signing in. It does not delete what is already stored here, so email us as well if you want that gone too.

Nearly everything else in the app is something you typed in yourself:

• trips and dreams: names, dates, destinations and notes
• itinerary items: flights, stays, tours, cruises and the rest, with their times, places and notes
• todos, packing lists and cost entries
• crew messages: what you write in a trip’s thread, the votes you start or cast, and the stamps you put on other people’s messages
• notes you write about countries and places
• passport records: the issuing country and the expiry date only. VaykMode has no field for a passport number, and no plan for one. Please do not put one in a note either.
• visa and entry notes: the status you set, the dates, any web address you save, and whatever you wrote in the notes box
• settings: your display name, temperature unit, date format, which day starts your week, page size for downloads, your usual currency, how far ahead you want document reminders, the countries you have marked as never needing travel documents, which one-time hints you have finished with, and small per-trip view preferences such as which sections you keep open

Some of those settings are guessed from your browser’s language and region the first time you sign in, purely so the app does not open in the wrong units. They are yours to change in Settings.

A trip is yours alone until you share it. When you add someone to a trip’s crew, they can see the trip, its itinerary, its shared notes and its shared todos.

These stay private to you even on a shared trip:

• your own packing list for the trip
• any note or todo you marked private
• your passport records and your visa notes. Nobody else on the trip sees them, not even a summary of whether they are in order: your documents are shown to you alone

A trip with crew also has a message thread, and everyone who can see the trip sees all of it: what you write there, and which stamp you put on somebody else’s message. Votes are the one exception. Your choice is recorded against your account, so the app can show you what you picked and stop asking, but it is shown to nobody else, not even to whoever started the vote. They see the tally and how many people have answered.

Adding someone to a trip means giving us the email address you invited, so we can match it to their account when they sign in. The rest of the crew never see it. They do see a name for you: the one the trip’s owner picked when they added you, or your own display name where they did not. Nothing about your other trips is shared with them.

If you invite someone who never signs in, we hold the email address and the name you typed for them until you take them off the trip. They can write to us at privacy@vaykmode.com to have it removed sooner.

Two outside services do a specific job for the app. Neither is told who you are: no name, no email address, no account identifier.

• Geoapify, for place search. When you type into a place field, the text you type is sent to Geoapify so it can be turned into a real location.
• Open-Meteo, for weather. Coordinates and dates from your trip are sent so it can return the forecast or the historical record for them.

Both sets of results are cached in our own database so the same lookup is not repeated. Those caches hold public geographic facts and are not tied to your account: the place search cache is keyed on the search text itself, with no record of who typed it.

Your device never talks to Geoapify or Open-Meteo directly. VaykMode’s own server does, on your behalf, so it is our server’s address that reaches them, not yours. Your own IP address is visible to our hosting providers instead, as ordinary web traffic, the way it would be for any website (see “Where it is kept” below).

The app runs on Railway and the database is Neon, a managed Postgres service. Both hold the data on servers in the United States. Traffic to and from the site is encrypted with HTTPS.

Like any web host, those providers keep routine server logs, which can include IP addresses. We do not build anything on top of them.

No system is perfectly secure, and it would be dishonest to promise otherwise. What we can say is that access to the database is restricted, the app checks who you are on every request, and the most sensitive fields were kept out of the design in the first place rather than protected after the fact.

• One sign-in cookie, so that you stay signed in between visits. It expires after 14 days.
• A couple of small preference cookies, remembering things like which view you last used on Places.

That is the entire list. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics, and no third-party trackers anywhere in the app.

If you send a note with the “How’s it going?” button, we store your message, the mood you picked, the page you were on, which trip if you were viewing one, and your browser’s window size, saved against your account so we know who to thank.

Only the page path is recorded, never anything after the question mark in the web address: search terms and one-off tokens live there, and writing “this page is broken” is not consent to hand those over.

If a page or a save fails, we keep a record of the failure so it can be fixed: what went wrong, the page you were on, your account id, your browser’s name and window size, and the reference code the error screen shows you. Only the page path is recorded, never anything after the question mark in the web address, the same rule as feedback.

We also keep a note of when a trip or item is deleted, including its name, and by whom. It is a record, not an undo: there is no way to restore a deletion yet.

We also record when an account is created and when someone signs in, against that account’s id, along with the times a permission check turned a request down. That is how a sign-in problem gets noticed before anyone has to report it. What you do once you are inside is not recorded.

Those records are kept for up to 60 days and then deleted, some of them sooner.

• Sell, rent or share your data with data brokers or advertisers.
• Run advertising, analytics, or any form of behavioural tracking.
• Follow you around other websites.
• Send you marketing, newsletter, or automated notification email. We only reply to direct support or privacy inquiries you send to us.
• Use anything you write here to train a machine-learning model.

Your data is kept for as long as your account exists. There is no self-service delete button yet, so email privacy@vaykmode.com and we will remove the account by hand.

Deleting an account takes everything attached to it: your trips, itineraries, notes, todos, packing lists, cost entries, dreams, passport records, visa notes, and the messages and votes on trips you own. Trips you own go with it, which means they also disappear for anyone you shared them with, so it is worth handing a trip over first if other people are relying on it.

What you put on somebody else’s trip is handled separately, because it belongs to that trip rather than to yours: a message in its thread, a vote you cast, a cost you entered against the total. Taking those away without warning would leave holes in someone else’s record, so we will ask you what you want done with them rather than decide for you.

Copies can survive for a short while in our host’s routine backups before those roll over. The weather and place-search caches stay, since they are public geographic facts with nothing in them that points back to you.

If you are in the UK or the EU, data protection law gives you the right to see a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, take it elsewhere, and object to or restrict how it is used. Email privacy@vaykmode.com and we will sort it out. There is no charge and no form to fill in, and we will respond to and handle all data requests within 30 days.

The legal bases we rely on are simple ones: we process what you enter in order to provide the service you asked for, and we keep sign-in records because a service with accounts cannot work without them.

If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, or to the data protection authority where you live.

VaykMode is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. It is invite-only, so nobody can sign up unasked.

We may update this policy as VaykMode evolves, for instance if we add optional features like a way to support the project through donations, or if a third-party service changes.

If a change is minor, we will update the date at the top of this page. If we make a significant change to how we handle your data, we will post a clear notice inside the app before the change takes effect. Nothing here will ever be backdated or applied retroactively.

Questions, corrections, or a request about your own data: privacy@vaykmode.com.