Placebook Privacy Policy
Effective Date : September 26, 2026
Placebook is made by GnomeApps. This policy explains what Placebook does with your information. In short: Placebook has no account, no servers, no analytics and no advertising. Your photos, notes and voice recordings stay on your device. The one piece of information that does leave your device is described in full below.
What we collect
Nothing. GnomeApps does not collect, receive, store or sell any information about you. Placebook does not connect to any server we operate, because we do not operate one. There is no sign-in, no tracking and no third-party analytics, crash-reporting or advertising code in the app.
What stays on your device
Everything Placebook works with is kept in the app’s own storage on your iPhone:
- Photos you choose. Placebook reads the photos you pick, including the location and date recorded in them, to work out which places you have been to. It refers to photos in your library rather than copying them, and keeps a smaller copy of each imported photo so a place still has its picture if the original is later removed or kept only in iCloud.
- Places, names, notes and collections that you create.
- Voice notes you record, and their transcripts.
- Information the app works out from your photos, such as text visible in a photo, what a photo shows, and short summaries of long voice-note transcripts. All of this is produced on your device by Apple’s built-in frameworks and Placebook’s bundled model. None of it is sent anywhere.
- Performance diagnostics that iOS provides to the app (MetricKit). These are stored on the device and are never sent to us.
Permissions
Placebook asks for each permission only when you use the feature that needs it. You can change any of them at any time in the iPhone Settings app.
| Permission | What it is used for |
|---|---|
| Photos | Reading the photos you select, and finding a photo you share to Placebook from another app |
| Add to Photos | Saving photos you take with Placebook’s camera to your photo library |
| Camera | Taking a new photo of a place from inside the app |
| Microphone | Recording voice notes you attach to a place |
| Speech Recognition | Writing out your voice notes so they can be searched. Transcription is required to happen on your device, and the audio is never uploaded. If your device cannot transcribe on its own, no transcript is made. |
| Location (while using the app) | Only when you ask Placebook to mark where you are right now, or ask whether you have been somewhere before. There is no background location tracking. |
What leaves your device
Place names. To name a place (for example “Cubbon Park” rather than a pair of coordinates), Placebook sends the place’s coordinates to Apple’s geocoding service, which is built into iOS. Only the coordinates are sent. No photo, note, recording or information that identifies you goes with them. Apple handles this request under Apple’s Privacy Policy.
Maps. When a place’s screen shows a map, the map is loaded from Apple Maps for that area, as in any app that shows an Apple map.
Only when you ask:
- Navigate opens the maps app you choose (for example Apple Maps or Google Maps) with that place’s location. From then on, that app’s own privacy policy applies.
- Share sends what you choose to share to the app or person you pick, using the standard iOS share sheet.
iCloud and backups
Placebook does not sync to iCloud and has no cloud storage of its own. Like most apps, its data is included in your iPhone’s backups (to iCloud or to a computer) if you have backups turned on. Those backups are managed by Apple and your device settings, not by us.
Spotlight
Place names can appear in iPhone Search (Spotlight) so you can find a place from the home screen. This index is kept on your device.
Deleting your data
- Settings → Storage → Erase All Content in Placebook deletes every place, note, voice recording, saved photo copy and search index entry the app has created. Your original photos in the Photos app are not touched.
- Deleting the app removes all of its data from your device.
Because we never receive your data, there is nothing for us to delete on our side.
Children
Placebook is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect any information from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If Placebook’s handling of your information changes, we will update this page and its effective date before that version of the app is released.
Contact
Questions about this policy or about Placebook: hello@gnomeapps.com