Privacy Policy

1. The Data We Collect (And Why)

To power your travel logs and map your journeys automatically, we process a few key pieces of information:

• Account Identity: Your username, registration email address, profile photo, and bio.
• When you were last active: while you're logged in, we note the time of your latest visit (at most once an hour). We use it only to run the service, for example to see how many people use Journolog; it isn't shown to anyone.
• Verified Sender Data: We link your account to your registered email address(es). Our system will only accept email-to-publish submissions sent from these verified addresses to prevent spammers from hijacking your timeline.
• Your Content: The narratives you write, the images you upload, and the video snapshots you share.
• Automated Location & Time Data (EXIF): When you upload images (via the web dashboard or email), our system extracts the embedded time and GPS coordinates. We use this data strictly to automatically place your memories on your route map and timeline.
• Optimized Storage: To protect our server infrastructure, all uploaded images are automatically stripped of bloated camera background data, resized to standard web maximums, and converted into lightweight .webp files.

2. Your Privacy Choices: Public vs. Private

You are in complete control of who sees your travel journals.

• Public Journeys: These are open to the internet. Anyone with the link can view your timeline, look at your maps, and leave emoji reactions or comments.
• Private Journeys: These are kept private to your account. Visitors cannot view any text, photos, videos, or map coordinates.

3. Content Monitoring & Our AI Guardrail

We respect your personal space and have no interest in snooping through your adventures.

• No Manual Monitoring: We do not read, monitor, or manually browse your private, unpublished Journeys. Your private trips are entirely your business.
• Automated AI Safety Screening: To protect our platform from being used for illegal or malicious purposes, we reserve the right to use automated AI safety screening tools to scan incoming content.
• The Trigger Rule: If an automated safety scan trips a severe policy trigger (such as detecting illegal activity, hate speech, or malicious software code), the system flags the entry for manual review by our team. If a violation is confirmed, we reserve the right to suspend the account.

4. Account Tiers & Advertising: Voyager vs. Navigator

How we fund journolog depends entirely on the tier you choose:

5. Our Third-Party Infrastructure Partners

While your primary account data is securely hosted locally on our private server architecture, we utilize a few trusted, industry-standard services to power our core features:

• Cloudflare: Runs our domain's DNS and the network every visit to journolog.com passes through, protecting the site from attacks; it sees your IP address and the pages you request. We also keep our daily backups in Cloudflare R2.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics: counts visits to journolog.com without cookies and without identifying you: which pages are viewed, the site you came from, your country and your browser type. It stores nothing in your browser and needs no consent.
• Hostinger: Hosts the server that runs Journolog and stores your account, journeys and photos, and sends our account emails (address confirmation, password reset).
• Sentry: Receives error reports when something breaks, so we can fix it. Reports contain technical details (the page, the error, your browser type), but no names, email addresses, passwords or form contents, and IP addresses are not stored.
• UptimeRobot: Checks every few minutes that the site is up. It only visits our own pages and never sees visitor data.
• Google Analytics: Measures how the site is used (pages viewed, approximate location, device and browser), using cookies, only if you accept them (see section 6). It is not loaded on the pages for confirming your email, resetting your password or changing your email address.
• Stripe: Handles Navigator payments as the merchant of record (Stripe Managed Payments): Stripe processes the payment, handles the VAT and sends the receipt. Journolog never sees or stores your card details.
• Mapbox: Draws the maps and finds the places you search for. Your browser loads the maps from Mapbox, which also collects anonymous usage statistics.

The share buttons (Facebook, X, WhatsApp) and our links to Facebook and Instagram only contact those services if you click them.

6. Cookies and Local Storage

We keep this to a minimum. Only Google Analytics needs your permission; everything else is needed for the site to work, so it is always on.

Always on (needed for the site to work)

• Staying logged in: when you log in, your browser keeps your login in its local storage, so you stay logged in between visits. It is removed when you log out.
• Unlocked journeys: when you enter a journey's password, a cookie remembers that you unlocked it, for 30 days, so you don't have to type it again.
• Your cookie choice: your browser remembers whether you accepted or rejected analytics cookies, and when, for 12 months.
• Cloudflare may set its own security cookies to tell visitors apart from automated attacks.
• Stripe: when you upgrade to Navigator, you pay on Stripe's own checkout page, which uses its own cookies for the payment and to prevent fraud.
• Mapbox: on pages that show a map, Mapbox's map code keeps an anonymous identifier in your browser's local storage and tells Mapbox that a map was loaded. Mapbox uses this to count map views.

Only if you accept: Google Analytics

• Google Analytics uses the cookies _ga and _ga_FCQRP23CL4 to count visits and see which pages are used. Until you click “Accept”, it is not loaded at all and your browser does not contact Google.

Changing your choice

Click “Cookie settings” at the bottom of any page, or under Privacy in your account settings. If you reject or withdraw, Google Analytics stops at once and its cookies are deleted. We ask again after 12 months, or sooner if we change the cookies we use.

7. Managing Your Data

Your data belongs to you. If you ever decide to leave journolog, you can delete your account yourself, under Settings → “Delete my account”. This deletes, at once and for good, your profile and login, all your journeys with their entries and photos, your Media Library and its Trash, your likes, comments and follows, and your saved journeys. A Navigator subscription is cancelled at the same time. Backups are kept for up to 30 days, only to restore the service after a failure. After that, deleted data is gone from them too.

8. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

If you are accessing journolog.com from within the European Economic Area (EEA), you are protected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). journolog is the Data Controller for your personal account information.

Legal Bases for Processing Your Data

Under GDPR, we only process your personal data when we have a valid legal grounding:

• Contractual Necessity: We process your login credentials, email address, and billing data to create your account, manage your Navigator subscription, and deliver our platform services.
• Consent: When you upload travel entries, photos, videos, or allow our system to extract EXIF location metadata for maps, you explicitly give us consent to host and display that specific data. You can withdraw this consent at any time by deleting the post or your entire account.
• Legitimate Interests: We log system errors and run privacy-safe automated safety scans to ensure network security, prevent system spam, and protect our server infrastructure from abuse.

International Data Transfers

journolog is domiciled in the United States. The travel records, photos, and metadata you provide will be transferred from your location, processed, and stored on our secure private server infrastructure located in the United States (or our fallback VPS data nodes). By using the service or emailing updates to your log, you acknowledge and consent to this international transfer. We employ defensive data encryption (both in transit and at rest) to safeguard your files.

Your Explicit GDPR Data Rights

You hold absolute control over your digital footprint on journolog. You may exercise these rights at any time by contacting us at [email protected]:

• The Right to Access & Portability: You have the right to request a digital copy of all data we hold about you. We will provide this file to you in a standard structured JSON and media zip format.
• The Right to Rectification: You can modify, edit, or update your bio, email, or journal entries at any time via your Creator Dashboard.
• The Right to Erasure (“Right to be Forgotten”): You can delete your complete account at any time (see section 7), and all of it is deleted at once. Within your account, deleting a journey deletes it for good, with its entries and the photos used only in it. Photos you take out of an entry, or that belonged to a deleted entry, stay in your Media Library until you remove them: there you move them to the Trash, where they are deleted for good after 14 days, or straight away if you choose “Delete for good”.
• The Right to Restriction or Objection: You may object to the future processing of your data, or restrict our system from parsing photo EXIF location metadata by turning off mapping features in your settings.