Browsing is anonymous

You do not need an account to use Anywhere. You can open the app, browse the map, and look at places and their ratings without signing in or giving us any personal information.

What we collect when you sign in

Signing in is only needed to contribute — rating a place, saying you’re here, adding a place, or saving a shortlist. You can sign in with Google or, on iPhone and iPad, with Apple. When you do, our authentication provider (Google Identity Platform) creates an account for you and gives our server an account ID and your email address. Our own database stores only that account ID, never your email — the email lives with the sign-in provider, not with us. If you tell us your worker type (for example, "freelancer") or your home city, we store that too, attached to your account, so we can tailor what you see.

What a contribution actually is

A contribution is a star rating from 1 to 5 and a handful of preset tags you tap (like "fast wifi" or "quiet"). There is no free-text field anywhere in the app for reviews or comments, so we never store anything you type about a place — because there is nowhere to type it. You can also add a place that is missing from the map: you search for it, pick it from a list of Google results, and we look the place up ourselves from that result — you never type the place’s own details. The place goes on the map straight away, and the fact that you added it is recorded against your account ID.

Location

Anywhere asks for your location once, on the last step of first-run setup, after telling you what it is for — and only when you tap Continue. It never asks the moment the app opens. The decision is yours to make in your device’s own dialog, and if you decline there the app does not ask again; the "near me" control on the map takes you to your settings instead. It only ever uses your location while the app is in use, never in the background, and you can decline and keep using the app normally, centred on Sydney by default. Your location is used on your device to centre the map, show your distance to places, and order search results by distance; it is not stored on our servers. When it is used to sort places or search results, it is sent to our server as a coordinate to compute that ordering, but that coordinate is never written to our database.

Saying you’re here

If you tap "I’m here" on a place, we record that your account was there, and when — that record is kept so you can see how many times you have been to a place, and so the busy indicator ("Filling up", "Packed", and so on) can reflect people actually there. This is genuinely sensitive: it is a timestamped, per-place, per-account record of a real place you physically visited, kept indefinitely rather than deleted after the fact. Nobody but you can ever see it — not other users, and not on any public part of the app. The only things anyone else ever sees are aggregate, anonymous counts (how many people are there right now); there is no way, anywhere in the product, for another person to see who is or has been at a place, only how many. Your "I’m here" itself — whether you currently count toward that public number — expires a short time after you tap it, and you can end it early at any time, but ending it does not delete the visit from your own history. You can only ever be counted as "here" at one place at a time; checking in somewhere new replaces which place counts you as present, without erasing where you already were. Deleting your account deletes this entire history outright — unlike a rating, it is not anonymised and kept, because presence history is not something we consider ours to keep once you leave.

Where places come from

Place details (name, address, category, opening hours, phone number, website, Google’s own star rating and rating count, price level, and whether the place is still operating) come from Google Maps Platform, and we store them in our own database rather than fetching them each time you look. A monthly job re-syncs them from Google, so what you see is our copy as at the last sync, not a live reading. Photos work the same way: we keep a small number of a place’s Google photos — at most five — as cached copies of our own, and serve those. A place’s Google identifier is kept indefinitely; its coordinates may not be cached for more than 30 days under Google’s terms, so a nightly job refreshes any that are older than 25 days. Every one of these fields is marked in our database as having come from Google, so all of it can be found and deleted in a single query if we ever change this position. Some places also show a short accessibility note, and some of the tags on a place are drawn from OpenStreetMap rather than from anyone tapping them — this OpenStreetMap data is stored in our database too. © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL), see openstreetmap.org/copyright.

What we do with Google reviews

Google reviews are never shown in Anywhere. Our server reads a place’s Google reviews to work out which of our preset tags the text supports — whether people describe the coffee as good, for instance — keeps only the resulting counts, and discards the text. Review text, reviewers’ names and review dates are never written to our database, in any form, for any length of time. The only thing kept is that numeric signal, which is why the app can say a tag was "also mentioned" without ever quoting anyone.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics (GA4) to understand how people use the app — for example, whether saving a place makes someone more likely to come back. This records events like opening the app, viewing a place, or saving one, along with your account ID if you are signed in (the same ID described above, not a separate one), so we can follow your own usage over time without knowing your name or email. It never records anything you type: the two places you can type — search, and searching for a place to suggest — send no text to analytics at all. This data is shared with Google as our analytics provider, under their standard data processing terms, and is not used to show you ads.

Where your data lives

Our database and servers run on Google Cloud, hosted in the Sydney (Australia) region.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from Account → Delete account, right inside the app — you do not need to email anyone. Deleting your account clears your profile information immediately. Your past ratings are not deleted outright; they are anonymised (reassigned to a generic "deleted user") so that other people’s view of a place’s overall rating stays accurate. Your saved-places shortlist and your entire "I’m here" history (see "Saying you’re here" above) are deleted outright, not anonymised. A place you suggested that is still waiting to be reviewed keeps your account ID against it, so we can tell where the suggestion came from.

What we don’t do

We do not sell your data. We do not show ads. We do not share your information with third parties beyond the infrastructure providers named above (Google, for sign-in, maps, analytics and hosting) needed to run the service.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the app after a change means you accept the update.

Contact

Operator: Powerup Digital (powerupdigital.agency). Data access or deletion requests can be sent to hello@powerupdigital.agency, though deletion is immediate and self-serve in the app under Account → Delete account.