What we keep, and why.

One privacy notice for everything Via Nostalgia runs: vianostalgia.com, Adventures, Events, Revival, Studio, and our connector for AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT.

Who is responsible

The controller for all Via Nostalgia services (Art. 4(7) GDPR) is Via Nostalgia (operator details in the Impressum). Via Nostalgia is run by one person. We have not appointed a data protection officer, as the law does not require one for a service of this size. Write to hello@vianostalgia.com about anything on this page.

The short version

• No ads, no ad cookies, no tracking cookies, and we never sell your data.
• Adventures and Studio work without an account. Without one, your passport and your projects stay on your device.
• Your location stays on your phone. We never store where you are.
• Studio's photos, clips and sound never leave your device, and its AI tools run on your device.
• One account works across Adventures, Events, Revival and Studio. Deleting it in Adventures deletes it everywhere.

vianostalgia.com and the contact form

The home site sets no cookies and does not measure visitors. When you send the contact form, we keep what you type: your name, email address, which kind of contact you are, the extra details you choose to add, your message, and whether you'd like updates. We also keep the date, the page that brought you to the form, the country your connection came from, and a scrambled code made from your IP address, so we can stop one sender filling our inbox.

We use it to reply to you and follow up on the conversation you started. If you ticked "updates", we send you a few emails a year until you unsubscribe. We send you a confirmation by email, and a copy of your message reaches our own inbox.

One account for everything

Your Via Nostalgia account lives in Adventures. You sign in with a passkey (we keep only its public half) or with a one-time email link. A sign-in link works once, for 20 minutes, and we store only a fingerprint of it, not the link. Signing in keeps you signed in on that device for 60 days.

Studio uses the same account directly. Events and Revival use "Sign in with Via Nostalgia": the first time, you are asked to agree, once per app. Then Adventures sends that app only:

• an id made for that app alone, so the apps can't match you by your account id;
• your credit name (or your @handle if you have no credit name);
• your email address, if you have one, and whether it is confirmed.

Nothing else: not your passport, stamps, friends or adventures. You can remove an app in Adventures Settings: that withdraws your agreement and signs you out of that app within about 10 minutes. To stop misuse, we log each sign-in hand-over with a scrambled code made from the requesting server's IP address, and delete that log after one hour.

Adventures

Adventures works without an account: your passport, stamps and adventures stay on your phone. If you create an account, we keep:

• Your passkeys (the public half only), and an email address if you add one for sign-in links and notices.
• The name you choose for credits, an optional @handle, your settings (including your time zone and daily goal), your XP and the stamps it came from: which place, and when.
• Adventures you make, save, finish or have shared with you, and who you share yours with.
• Friends, friend requests, people you block, and high fives (kept 30 days).
• Reports you make about public adventures, with the reason if you give one.
• Your inbox: notices about your adventures, friends and contributions, kept 180 days.
• How many questions you asked a guide each day (not the questions themselves; see AI features).
• Photos, condition reports and places you send in, with our review decision. Until a photo is approved, only you and our reviewers can see it. Approved photos go to Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 with your credit name.
• Old photos you share from your own archive, with what you tell us about them: when it was taken and how precisely, who took it (you, or a family member and their name if you give one), your memory or caption, whether it was taken from today's viewpoint, and whether there are people in it. We don't accept photos taken by someone outside your family: if you tell us someone else took it, or you don't know, nothing is uploaded.
• Reports that a place's information is wrong: which place, what is wrong, any correction or note you add, and the time. If you were near the place, we keep how far from it your phone said you were, never your position.
• If you walk an adventure someone else made while signed in, that you started and finished it, so its maker can earn XP. If you make adventures, a record of the XP they earned you and when, without the ids of the people who walked them.
• When you invite someone to an adventure by email, that address and the invitation. They can opt out of all invitations with one click, and then we keep their address only on a do-not-email list.

When you move Adventures to a new web address or a new device with a hand-over link, the progress on your phone is held on our server for at most 10 minutes, until the new address picks it up.

What other people see in Adventures

• The weekly league: your credit name, XP and stamp count in each city you play, for anyone who opens it. You are in it unless you switch off "Show me in the weekly league" in Settings.
• Your profile card: your name, @handle, number of stamps and number of cities, for anyone who looks up your handle. Switch off "Public profile card" to show it to friends only.
• Friends see your XP, streak and stamps this week, and the places you stamped and adventures you finished in the last 14 days. In Settings you choose who can send you friend requests: anyone, friends of friends, or nobody.
• Your friend link: anyone you give it to can add you as a friend straight away. You can make a new link at any time, and the old one stops working.
• Each adventure you make is private, open to anyone with the link, or public, as you choose. Anyone who can open an adventure sees its title, note, stops and your credit name. Public adventures with at least two stops also appear in the Community tab for their city, with how many people walked and saved them.
• When someone saves, copies, walks or finishes your adventure, or sends you a high five or a friend request, you see their credit name. Nobody ever sees anyone's email address.
• Approved photos, condition reports and places show your credit name. Approved old photos show on their place with the date, your memory and a credit line.

Location, photos and videos

Adventures uses your phone's location on your phone only: to show where you are on the map and to check that you are at a place before you stamp it. We don't store where you are. Two things send part of it:

• Searching for a street or an address sends your search words and the middle of the map you are looking at, rounded to about a kilometre, to our server, never your own position. We pass them on to Photon, komoot's address search.
• Sending a photo or a condition report includes how far you were from the place and how precise your phone's location was, not where you stood.

Location and camera details are removed from photos on your phone before upload, and again on our server. Faces in every photo you send are found and blurred on your phone before upload, so the original faces never reach us. The detector can miss small or side-on faces, so reviewers check too. If you are recognisable in a photo on Adventures and want it removed, write to us and we take it down.

Recap videos and adventure videos are made on your own device and never uploaded.

When you propose a place from a Google Maps link, our server opens that link at Google and asks Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap's Nominatim what is at that spot. A reviewer may pass an approved correction for an OpenStreetMap place on to OpenStreetMap as a public note, with what is wrong and your correction, never your name or account.

Events and Revival

Events lists heritage events people publish and invite others to. Revival lists volunteer projects that need hands; signing up for a volunteer day works like answering an event invitation.

• Your account there: you sign in only with your Via Nostalgia account, and we keep what "Sign in with Via Nostalgia" sends (above), plus an optional handle, short bio, picture and language. For security, each sign-in session keeps your IP address and browser type, and ends after 60 days.
• Answering an event: your display name, email address, your answer, how many guests you bring, whether you were checked in, and your place on a waiting list. The organiser sees your display name, email address, answer, waiting-list place and check-in. We never ask for a phone number.
• Invitations: when an organiser invites you, we keep your email address, the name and personal message they gave, until the invitation is answered or expires.
• Publishing an event or project: its title, dates, place, description, photos, and the organiser name and public contact details you give. Everything except your account and private notes to our reviewers is public, also through the connector for AI assistants.
• Saved projects in Revival, votes and backing where an event offers them, and the email digests you ask for.
• Bot checks: signing in, and the reply and invitation pages, use Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks your browser for signs of a bot without a cookie puzzle.
• Counting visits: we count page views per day by page, the website that linked to us, country and device type. Nothing in that count identifies you.
• Organisation tools: organisations that use Atlas, the tool for gathering local knowledge, can have it read and sort their own material with AI models run by Cloudflare. An organisation may choose its own AI provider instead; then it is responsible for that choice.

When you answer an event, the organiser uses your details for their event, and is responsible for how they use them after that.

Studio

Studio, our video editor, runs in your browser. Your photos, clips, music and voice stay on your device, in the browser's own storage, and are never uploaded. Captions, translation, reframing and voice-overs are made by AI models that run on your device too: the sound, words and pictures never leave it.

To run those tools, your browser downloads the models and their code the first time you use them, from Hugging Face, jsDelivr and Google's file storage. Like any website you load, they see your IP address. They receive nothing from your projects.

If you sign in, we keep a copy of each project's layout (its timeline, texts and settings) and the presets you save, so you can open them on another device. The layout names each file you used, with its type, size, length, picture size, a fingerprint of the file, and the time it was taken if the file says so. Never the file itself. You can delete projects in Studio, and they go when you delete your account. What Studio counts, without cookies, is under Measuring.

AI features and the connector for AI assistants

Ask a guide, in Adventures

Signed-in people can ask a guide up to 20 questions a day about a place. Your question, the guide's earlier answers in that chat (up to four), and the place's own facts go from our server to OpenRouter, which passes them to a free AI model. We send no name, account id, email or location. We don't store your questions or the answers, only how many you asked that day. Don't put personal details in a question: free AI models may keep what they are sent, under their own providers' rules.

The connector for AI assistants

Via Nostalgia has a read-only connector for AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, at adventures.vianostalgia.com/mcp. It answers questions about landmarks, walking adventures, events and volunteer projects. You don't sign in, and it never sees your account, your name or your conversation.

• What reaches us: only what the assistant puts in a request, for example a city, a search word, a theme, a place or event id, and sometimes a place to search around, given as a landmark, a street, or a map point. The assistant decides what to send. Our tools ask for a place to search around, never for where you are.
• Who sends it: the assistant's company (for example Anthropic or OpenAI) calls our server from its own computers, so we usually see their network address, not yours. Their privacy policies cover your conversation with them.
• What we keep: nothing from the request goes into our database. To stop abuse, the server counts requests per network address in memory, for at most one hour. Errors are written to our host's short technical logs.
• Who else sees it: when a request names a street or address to search around, we pass those words to Photon, komoot's address search, to turn them into a map point.
• What comes back: only what our apps already publish: landmarks with their sources, our drawings, credited photos, guided adventures, public adventures without their maker's name, and approved events and volunteer projects.

Measuring, without cookies

To see which features help, Adventures sends anonymous events: for example "opened a place" or "saved an adventure", with the city, the place or adventure, the page that linked to us, the campaign tag of a link, whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer, and the error message if something breaks. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device for this. We never store your IP address. To count people per day, the server mixes a random value that changes daily with your browser type, language and country into a short code. The random value is deleted after two days, so a code can't be traced back or linked across days. If you are signed in, events are linked to your account, so we can see whether people come back. Raw events are deleted after 90 days. Events and Revival only count page views, as above. The home site measures nothing.

Studio counts the same way, with the same daily code, no cookies and nothing stored on your device for it. It counts: opening Studio (and the page that linked to it, and whether it runs installed or in the browser), starting a project with its template and shape, importing files (how many photos, clips and sound files, and their total size in a band such as "10 to 50 MB"), starting, finishing, failing or cancelling an export (with its shape, quality, length and time in bands, the file size in a band, and a short reason such as "out of memory" if it fails), sharing a video, signing in, whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer, and the error message if something breaks, with links, file paths and names taken out. It never sends your files, file names, project names, words, captions, places or anything you type. If you are signed in, events are linked to your account.

Email

Adventures sends email only for sign-in links, the notices you switch on in Settings, and a weekly summary in weeks with stamps or news (switch it off in Settings). Events and Revival send invitations, reminders before events you answered, and the digests you choose. Every email except sign-in links has a one-click unsubscribe link. We keep a list of the emails we sent, to keep to our sending limits and find delivery problems; see How long.

Legal bases

For anyone under 16, consent is given by a parent or guardian. Where we rely on legitimate interest, you can object at any time (see Your rights).

How long we keep it

Deleting your account. In Adventures, Settings has "Delete account". It closes your one account everywhere: Adventures, Studio, Events and Revival. You have 7 days to change your mind by signing in. After that, our weekly clean-up removes your account, passkeys, adventures, XP, friends, high fives, inbox, Studio projects, and your Events and Revival account with your answers to events, which is erased straight after the 7 days, with no further wait. All your photos are deleted from our storage, whatever their review state. Photos already published on Wikimedia Commons stay there under their licence, with your credit name, and Adventures keeps showing them from Commons. Approved reports and places stay, without your account and without their photo, and approved reports lose your own words. Events and projects you published as an organisation stay with that organisation. Ask, and we delete anything sooner.

Who helps us

A few companies process data for us, under contracts that bind them to our instructions. Some others your browser contacts directly, for maps, photos and Studio's tools. The full list, with what each one gets and where, is on Processors. In short:

• Cloudflare hosts every site and stores our databases and files.
• Brevo sends our email, for every service.
• OpenRouter and the AI model it picks answer "Ask a guide".
• Photon by komoot and Nominatim by OpenStreetMap answer address searches.
• Your browser loads map tiles from OpenFreeMap and photos from Wikimedia.

We never sell your data, and we share it with nobody else, unless the law makes us.

Data outside the EU

Cloudflare and OpenRouter are US companies. Our main databases sit in Cloudflare's European data centres, but Cloudflare's network serves every visit from the nearest data centre, which may be outside the EU, and Adventures photos are stored in Cloudflare storage that is not pinned to the EU. Questions to a guide go to OpenRouter in the US and to the AI provider it picks, which may be anywhere. For these transfers we rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the company is certified, and otherwise on the EU's Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46 GDPR).

Your rights

You can ask to see what we hold about you (Art. 15), correct it (Art. 16), delete it (Art. 17), limit its use (Art. 18), take it with you (Art. 20), and object to uses based on legitimate interest (Art. 21). Where you gave consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

• Download: in Adventures, Settings has "Download my data": your account, adventures, XP, contributions, the XP your adventures earned you, your inbox, and what is on your phone. Events and Revival have a download on your account's data page.
• Delete: "Delete account" in Adventures Settings deletes your account across Adventures, Studio, Events and Revival, as described above.
• Anything else: write to hello@vianostalgia.com or use the contact form and choose "Other". We answer within one month.

You can also complain to a data protection authority, in the country where you live or work, or to ours: the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit).

Children

You must be at least 10 to make a Via Nostalgia account. If you are under 16, a parent or guardian must agree before you make one, and wherever we rely on consent (for example publishing your photos on Wikimedia Commons, digests or update emails, or signing in to Events and Revival), they must give it for you (Art. 8 GDPR). Without an account, Adventures and Studio work on your device and nothing reaches us. If you think a child under 10, or under 16 without a parent's agreement, has an account, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes

We update this page when our services change. If a change matters for you, we tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Cookies and browser storage are on Cookies.

Draft. Last updated 29 October 2026.