Svart Limited

NEAR

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 24 September 2026

NEAR is an audio walking guide. You put your phone in your pocket and it tells you about places as you reach them. This page explains exactly what that requires, what leaves your phone, and what we keep.

It describes what the app actually does, not what we might do later. If that changes, this page changes with it.

The short version

  • No account required. No email, no password. Signing in with Apple is optional and is only needed to buy or restore a subscription.
  • No advertising identifier, no analytics, no third-party trackers. The app uses only Apple's own frameworks.
  • We cannot identify you, and we have not built anything that could.
  • Your walk history stays on your phone. It is never uploaded. That includes the walk log in settings, which records what the guide heard you ask, word for word, so that when it answers something you did not mean you can see what it thought you said. It is readable only on your phone and leaves it only if you copy it.

Your name, if you give one

The introduction asks, optionally, what the guide should call you. It is stored on your phone and used for one thing: to be said back to you when you start a walk. It is not sent to our server, it is not part of any request, and leaving it blank changes nothing else.

Sign in with Apple (optional)

You can choose to sign in with Apple, for example to restore a subscription on another iPhone. If you do, Apple gives the app a random identifier that is meaningful only to NEAR, and — only if you choose to share it — your name. Both are stored on your phone. They are not sent to our server. You can revoke the sign-in at any time in Settings → your name → Sign-In & Security → Sign in with Apple.

Paying

Subscriptions are handled entirely by Apple. We never see a card, a payment or a receipt: your phone tells the app what you own, signed by Apple, and that is all we know. We do not store anything about what you have bought.

During the launch period the app asks our server one question — whether the guide is still free for everybody — and that request carries nothing about you.

Location

Why it is needed: the guide has to know when you have arrived somewhere worth hearing about. That decision is made on your phone.

What leaves your phone: your coordinates are sent to our server so it can return the places near you and work out which way to point ("about 40 metres ahead, on your right").

What happens to them: they are used to answer that request and then discarded. Your position is never written to our logs and never stored against any identifier — there is no identifier to store it against.

Background use: while a walk is running, the app keeps receiving your location with the screen off, so the guide can still speak from your pocket. iOS shows a blue indicator whenever this is happening. It stops when you end the walk.

One thing worth knowing: for places outside the cities we ship with the app, we look up what is nearby in Wikidata. That lookup uses a rounded grid square roughly two kilometres across, not your actual position, so Wikidata never receives where you are standing.

Microphone and what you say

During a walk the guide listens the whole time, including while it is speaking, so you can interrupt it the way you would interrupt a person — by talking. It is worth being exact about what that means. The microphone is open only while a walk is running. It is closed the moment you tap the microphone button — on the main screen or on the lock screen — and closed entirely when the walk ends. Outside a walk it is never open. iOS shows the microphone indicator for the whole time it is open.

The guide also hears itself. On a phone the speaker and the microphone are centimetres apart, so some of the narration comes back in. Your phone removes its own words before anything else happens to what it heard; they are never sent anywhere and never stored.

You can turn this off, and it stays off. Tap the microphone button — on the main screen or on the lock screen card — and the guide stops listening. Your answer is remembered between walks, so switching it off once is enough. With it off, the microphone is used only when you ask the guide a question by tapping.

What is done with what it hears: the same thing as a question you asked deliberately — it is turned into text, and your phone then decides whether what you said was addressed to the guide at all. Remarks to the person you are walking with are discarded on the phone and never sent anywhere. Only something the phone judges to be a question for the guide is sent to us, and only as text.

What your question becomes: your speech is turned into text using Apple's speech recognition. On devices that support offline recognition for the language you have chosen, this happens entirely on your phone. Where the device does not support it, Apple processes the audio under Apple's privacy policy. We do not control that step and we never receive the recording.

What we receive: the text of your question, and nothing else the microphone heard. We send it, along with the name of the place you are standing at, to Google's Gemini API to produce an answer. We do not keep your questions.

Live conversation is not offered. An earlier version could stream microphone audio to our server for a live conversation; that option has been withdrawn, and no raw audio leaves your phone in any mode.

What identifies your phone

A device token. On first launch your phone asks our server for a token and keeps it in the iOS Keychain. It contains a random string that means nothing outside our server. It is not your device's identifier, not an advertising identifier, and not linked to anything about you or your phone.

A trip identifier. A fresh random value each time the app is opened, used only to count what a single walk costs us so the guide can shorten itself before it becomes expensive. It is not kept after it stops being counted.

What we store on our servers

  • Narrations. When the guide tells the story of a place, we keep the recording so the next person to walk past hears it without it being generated again. These are about places, not about people: the same recording is played to everybody, and nothing about who heard it is stored.
  • Spending counters. A running total against the random trip identifier above.

That is the complete list. There is no user table, because there are no users to put in it.

Who else is involved

  • Google Cloud hosts our server (in Belgium).
  • Google's Gemini API writes the narrations and answers, and produces the speech. It receives place names, your chosen language and interests, and the text of your questions.
  • Apple provides speech recognition, as described above.
  • Wikidata provides the list of places, queried with a rounded grid square.

We do not sell data to anybody, and we have nothing to sell.

Children

NEAR is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.

Your choices

  • Location and microphone permissions can be withdrawn at any time in iOS Settings. Without location the guide cannot know when to speak; without the microphone you can still listen, you simply cannot ask questions.
  • Deleting the app removes your device token, your walk history and everything else held on the phone. Nothing about you remains on our side, because nothing about you was there.

Contact

NEAR is published by Svart Limited, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Questions about this policy: emrsimsek15@gmail.com