map.name is a private notebook that happens to live on the internet. Everything you save is private unless you decide otherwise, and this page explains exactly what that means, what we do with what you save, and what we never do.
map.name is operated by BNDDIGITAL LIMITED, Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, Ireland. It covers the map.name apps on iOS and Android and map.name on the web. Last updated 8 September 2026.
Your captures are private when you make them. Nothing becomes public unless you publish it yourself, block by block, and nothing derived from your private captures reaches a public page: not a summary, not a count, not a category name. Publishing is always a decision you make, never a default we chose for you.
| What | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Your handle, display name and profile photo | They are your address on map.name and appear on anything you publish |
| The email address from your Google or Apple sign in | To identify your account and contact you. We never receive your password: sign in happens with Google or Apple |
| Your captures: photos, links, notes, and where and when | They are the product. This is what you asked us to keep |
| What we work out about them | Descriptions, topics and a searchable document per capture, so you can find things the way you remember them |
| Basic technical logs | Keeping the service up and stopping abuse. We deliberately do not log the content of your captures |
| Subscription status, if you have one | Billing. Card details go to Stripe and never reach our servers |
We do not sell your data, we do not run advertising, and we do not build a profile of you for anybody else. There is no business model here that needs your attention or your secrets.
A capture is saved to your account first, so nothing is lost if you go offline. Shortly afterwards it is read once so the app can be useful: a photo is described, text is read, and a short searchable summary is written and turned into numbers a computer can match against. That is what lets you search for something the way you would say it out loud.
Some of that reading happens on our own servers, and some is done by established AI providers acting on our instructions. Those providers process the capture to answer our request and are not permitted to use it to train their models. If you blur or crop a photo before saving it, the untouched original is kept private to you and is never published, even when you publish the capture.
Publishing a written piece is a block by block decision: you see what goes public, what stays behind, and which parts are your own words. Removing a block withdraws it from the next published version.
Your name is also an address. Mail sent to you@map.name is stored encrypted, read by our own server rather than a third party, and shown only to you. We do not scan it to build a profile of you and we do not pass it to an advertiser, because there are no advertisers.
Nobody reaches you until you say so. A first message from an unknown sender waits in Requests. If you decline, their later mail is accepted and discarded rather than bounced, and they are never told: a refusal would confirm both that the address exists and that they in particular were blocked.
Messages are temporary on purpose. A conversation expires thirty days after its last message and a declined sender is deleted after seven. Anything you Keep becomes an ordinary permanent save and stops expiring, which is the only way mail becomes lasting.
Attachments are held in the same private storage as your other media, reachable only through a short-lived signed link, and they are removed with the message that carried them.
We keep this list short on purpose, and everyone on it works on our instructions:
Our servers are in France, and some of these providers operate internationally, so your data may be processed outside your own country under the standard protections that apply to those transfers.
For as long as you keep your account. When you delete your account, your content is hidden immediately and permanently removed after 90 days, and signing in during those 90 days restores everything exactly as you left it. Encrypted backups expire on their own schedule within a further 35 days. Full detail, including how to delete, is on the delete your account page.
We use local storage in your browser to keep you signed in and to remember display preferences such as your chosen palette. We do not use advertising or cross site tracking cookies.
map.name is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will remove it.
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will say so in the app rather than quietly updating a date at the top of this page.