Privacy
What Nearby History knows about you.
Nearby History is a walking guide to Luxembourg City: a map, a story for each place, read aloud as you walk. This page says what the app knows about you and where that goes. It is short because there is not much to say.
Without an account
Nothing about you is kept on our servers. Your position stays in your browser: it puts you on the map and decides what counts as near. The stories you have heard, the places you save and your language are kept in your browser's storage on this device only.
A few things have to leave your device for the app to work at all:
- The map comes from OpenFreeMap. Like any website, its servers see your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at.
- Directions. When you ask for a route, your position and the destination are sent to the routing service (Valhalla, run by FOSSGIS e.V. at valhalla1.openstreetmap.de) to work out the way.
- Search. What you type in the search box is sent to Photon (komoot) and, for street addresses, to Nominatim (OpenStreetMap). Your position is not sent with it; results are ranked around the city centre.
- Places and photographs. Photos are loaded from Wikimedia Commons. For places we have not written ourselves, the text comes from Wikipedia and Wikidata, and the places themselves from OpenStreetMap, fetched through our own server so that only the area of the map is passed on, not your address.
- Narration. Our own stories are pre-recorded. For other places the text is sent to our server, which asks ElevenLabs to read it. Only the text goes; nothing about you.
- When something breaks, the app sends us the error message, the page address and your browser's name, so we can fix it. No position, no name.
With an account
Signing in is optional and exists for one reason: to carry what you have heard and saved to your other devices. If you sign in, we keep:
- A name. The first name you type when you create an account with a passkey, or, with Google, the name of your Google account.
- How you sign in. For a passkey: the public half of the key your device created. The private half never leaves your device, and we cannot use the public half to sign in as you. For Google: your Google account's identifier and email address, so we recognise you next time.
- Your progress. The list of stories you have heard, the places you have saved, and your language.
- A cookie (
nh_session) that keeps you signed in for up to a year. It carries only a signed account number.
This is stored in a database on Amazon Web Services (Amazon DynamoDB, in Amazon's US East region in Northern Virginia, United States), set up through Vercel, the company that hosts the site. Nobody else receives it. There is no advertising and no analytics in the app or on this website, and we do not sell or share anything.
Signing in with Google
When you choose "Continue with Google", Google shows you what it will share — your name, email address and account identifier — and passes it to us only after you agree. We use it to create and recognise your account and for nothing else. Nearby History's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. The sign-in step itself is governed by Google's privacy policy.
Deleting it
In the menu, Settings → Delete account removes everything we hold about you, immediately and for good. Start over clears what you have heard and saved without removing the account. What is stored in your own browser is yours to clear from the browser's settings.
This website
The pages around the guide — this one included — are plain files. They set no cookies and load nothing from anyone but us, with two exceptions: the photographs, which come from Wikimedia Commons, and the front page, which shows the guide itself running in a frame and so loads its map as described above.
Hosting
The site runs on Vercel, from its Frankfurt region. As any host does, Vercel keeps short-lived server logs (IP addresses and requests) to run the service.
Changes
If any of this changes, this page and its date change with it.