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.
• 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• No Manual Monitoring: We do not read, monitor, or manually browse your private, unpublished Journeys.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:

• Postmark / AWS SES: Handles the inbound email gateway that intercepts the photos and text you email from the road.
• Mapbox / Leaflet: Renders the minimalist, interactive geographic maps on your public and private timelines.
• Stripe: Securely handles all paid Navigator premium subscriptions. journolog never sees, handles, or stores your credit card numbers.

6. Managing Your Data

Your data belongs to you. If you ever decide to leave journolog, you can delete your account from your dashboard settings. Doing so permanently clears your profile, your journals, and your media attachments from our active database.

7. 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, monitor inbound email sender verification headers, 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”): When you delete an entry, photo, or choose to delete your complete account, your records are permanently purged from our active PocketBase database.
• 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.