Privacy Policy

The short version

Star Flock GPS shows the cameras, waypoints and news around you, and lets you post, sell and talk with people near you. To do that, some of what you do leaves your phone: your account, what you post, and — when you ask Star something — your question and your rough position. We do not sell your data, there is no advertising and no advertising tracking, and we keep no history of where you drive. Everything is set out below.

Your account

You can use the GPS map without an account. An account (Sign in with Apple, Google, or email and password, run by Google Firebase) is needed for everything else. It holds your name and email address, and is what your profile, posts, listings and messages belong to. You can delete the account from the app at any time (Welcome page › Delete account); that removes your profile, photos, posts, listings, messages, likes, comments and follows from our servers.

Location

The app asks for location While Using the App. Your position is used to draw the map, find the cameras, waypoints, weather, traffic and news around you, plan routes, and give Star the context to answer you.

• Not stored as a history. The app keeps no record of your trips. A route in progress is remembered on the phone so a restart can resume it.
• On a post, the location is rounded to about a kilometre (and its city and state) so posts can be shown to people nearby. A pin you add on purpose is exact.
• On a listing, the pin is public unless you switch it off, in which case no coordinate is published at all.

What you post

Posts, photos, videos, voice notes, memes, music links, comments, likes, your profile (name, photo, banner, theme), followers and listings are stored on our servers (Google Firebase, and the Star Flock server on Railway) so other users can see them. Posts and listings are removed after 14 days unless you remove them sooner. Live video runs through Agora while you are live.

Messages between buyers and sellers are private: only the two people in the conversation can read them, and they are deleted after 14 days.

Safety checks on what is posted

To keep out nudity, drugs, illegal weapons and other illegal sales, the words of a post, comment or listing are checked on your phone, and every photo, meme and a few frames of every video are sent to Google Gemini to be checked before they are published. Pictures that cannot be checked are not posted. Reported posts are hidden from you at once and from everyone after several reports.

Selling is for people 18 and older. The first time you sell, the app asks your date of birth; it is kept on your phone only.

Star, the assistant

When you talk to Star, your question — turned into text by Apple's speech recognition — is sent to Google Gemini together with the context she needs: your approximate position, what is on the map near you (cameras, incidents, waypoints, listings), headlines, and your plan. Her spoken answers, turn-by-turn guidance and callouts are turned into her voice by Gemini's text-to-speech, or spoken by the iPhone's own voice when Gemini can't be reached (and always for people not signed in). Google's terms apply to what Gemini does with these requests.

What else leaves the device

• Map and place data — the area around you, sent to OpenStreetMap's Overpass service (sometimes through a proxy run for this app, which keeps no record of who asked).
• Routing and traffic — start and destination, sent to TomTom.
• Weather — your approximate position, sent to the US National Weather Service and Open-Meteo.
• Neighborhood Watch and alerts — your area, sent to public registries and feeds (sex-offender registry data, FBI, ICE and missing-person lists, FEMA alerts, Google News) to fetch what is near you.
• Markets, sports and lottery — public quotes and scores from Yahoo Finance, CoinGecko, ESPN and LotteryUSA. Nothing about you is sent.
• Music — what you search, sent to Apple's iTunes Search; music links you add are looked up with Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok or Vimeo to show their cover.
• Radio and scanner — a stream connection to the station's own servers while one plays.
• Your car photo, only if you scan one — sent to Meshy to make the 3-D car.
• Performance reports — Apple's daily measurements of how smoothly the app ran and where it froze or crashed (no personal content), stored with your account id so problems can be fixed.

Permissions

• Location — the map, nearby data and routes (above).
• Microphone and speech recognition — only while you are talking to Star or live.
• Camera and photos — only for what you choose to post, your profile pictures, going live, or scanning your car.
• Notifications — local alerts about nearby incidents.

Purchases

Subscriptions are handled by Apple's App Store. The app learns which plan is active; no payment details ever reach Star Flock.

What we do not do

• No advertising and no advertising identifiers; no tracking across other apps or websites.
• We do not sell or rent your data.
• No analytics SDKs and no data brokers.

Children

Star Flock is not intended for children under 13. Selling requires being 18 or older.

Your choices

You can use the map without an account, turn location off in iOS Settings (the map then can't follow you), turn Star's voice off, delete any post or listing, block people, and delete your account and its data from the app. Questions or requests about your data: the address below.

Changes

When the app starts doing something new with your data, this page will say so before that version ships.

Contact

Questions about this policy: kingzoe4040@gmail.com