PathieTürkçe

Privacy Policy

Effective date: 20 October 2026

Pathie records your walks, lets you draw routes, and — if you choose — share them. This document explains which of your data we process, why, and who we send it to. It contains everything shown on the notice screen when you first open the app, plus the company and country details promised there.

The data controller is established in Türkiye, so the processing is subject to Turkish data protection law (KVKK, Law no. 6698). If you are in the European Union you also have the rights granted by the GDPR, and this document is written to satisfy both.

1. What data is processed

What stays on your phone

Your location during walks (including in the background, with the screen off), the photos you take, your notes on stops, the map area you have uncovered (your "fog"), and statistics such as distance and duration. These live in your device's own database; Pathie works fully in airplane mode. They leave the phone only when you share something, when you turn a walk into a route (its points are map-matched once, below), or — encrypted — if you turn on Backup to my account (below).

What is written to the server with your account

Your email address, the username you choose, your display name and avatar, your age range, your device's encryption key, and your friend list. These are written the moment you create an account, because they are what identifies it.

We also keep when you last connected — the time only, a single value refreshed at most once an hour. What you do in the app, which screens you open, what you tap is not recorded: Pathie has no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier and no behavioural logging. The one timestamp exists for an operational reason: knowing how many people are using the app.

Each open session keeps the device's IP address and app signature; that is what answers "which device is this" under Settings → Account → "Signed-in devices". A session lives at most 90 days and its record goes when you sign out or delete the account.

If you allow notifications, your phone's notification address (push token) is kept with your account and with the session that registered it — it is the only way a notification can reach you. It is deleted when you sign out on that phone, when you end that phone's session under Settings → Account → "Signed-in devices", when the notification service reports that the address no longer works (for example after you uninstall the app), or when you delete your account.

If you sign in with Apple, the refresh token Apple issues for that sign-in is kept with your account, encrypted, for one purpose only: asking Apple to remove Pathie's access when you delete your account. It is deleted with the account.

If you subscribe, the store purchase token or receipt, account and product ids, purchase and expiry dates, store country and app version are written to the server with your subscription status. Your payment card never reaches us or RevenueCat.

Backup to your account (optional)

Off unless you turn it on, under Settings → Your data → "Backup to my account" or when the app offers it. While it is on, the phone uploads a copy of everything it keeps: your walks with their GPS track points, the fog, photos, journal and memories, saved places, plans with their emergency contacts, your pet and your conversation with it. The copy is encrypted on the phone with a key wrapped under your own master key or recovery phrase; the server stores it but cannot open it. It is held in Cloudflare R2 storage under the "eu" jurisdiction restriction.

What leaves your phone only when you share

The routes and walks you publish, room messages, the photos you send in rooms, memory collections you share with chosen people, your fog map and regional achievements if you share them, location photos you make public, and — if you turn it on — your live location.

A public location photo is published with its place rounded to about 100 metres and only the day it was taken, and anyone can see it until you withdraw it.

Live location is end-to-end encrypted with a key made for each sharing session and given only to the people you allowed. The server relays sealed packets it cannot read and stores none of them; once the connection closes no record remains. Room messages are end-to-end encrypted too, and the server cannot read them.

If you choose to share a walk, that walk's step count is written to the server as part of the share and is visible to the audience you chose (your friends, or everyone). Nothing is counted at all while the step counter is switched off in Settings.

Your interactions with shared content

When you like, save, copy or comment on a public route, or follow someone, that is recorded individually — there is no other way for a like to be undoable or for what you saved to stay in your list.

These records are also used to order the Discover feed for you. This is not an exception to the "no behavioural logging" sentence above but its boundary: what is recorded is your own action (what you liked), not your browsing behaviour — and none of it goes to advertising or to matching with a third party.

If you join the launch waitlist

If you join the launch waitlist on pathie.app, your email address and the language you chose are stored on Cloudflare D1 only to tell you when Pathie is available. The entry is deleted once that message has been sent, and you can ask for it to be deleted earlier at support@pathie.app.

2. Why it is processed, and on what legal basis

• Your account and profile — to provide the service; performance of a contract (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b); KVKK Art. 5/2-c).
• Sending the sign-in code to your email — to verify your identity; performance of a contract.
• Backup to your account — to bring your data back on a new phone; performance of a contract (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b); KVKK Art. 5/2-c). It runs only while you keep it on.
• Your subscription status — to verify the plan you bought and enable its features; performance of a contract (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b); KVKK Art. 5/2-c).
• Maps, routing, weather and address lookup — needed for the app to work; performance of a contract (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b); KVKK Art. 5/2-c). Part of this data is transferred abroad, and that transfer rests on appropriate safeguards rather than on consent (see below).
• Chatting with your pet — to produce a reply to what you typed; performance of a contract. Your message goes to an AI model (the Cloudflare row below); the conversation history stays on your phone, and in your encrypted backup if that is on. Before your first message the app shows what is sent and asks for your permission; without it nothing reaches the model. You can turn it off at any time in Settings → Privacy and security → Consents.
• Sharing and live location — these rely on a separate explicit consent, asked the first time you share; if you never share, this processing never happens.
• Crash reports — to see why the app failed; only with their own optional consent. They are off until you turn them on (on the first screen, or in Settings → Privacy and security → Consents → Crash reports), and you can turn them off there at any time.

3. International transfers — who receives what

Map tiles, route calculation and weather cannot be produced on your phone; they come from outside. The list below is complete. None of these recipients is located in Türkiye, and Turkish law treats this as a transfer abroad.

These transfers are continuous and part of how the app ordinarily works, so they rest on appropriate safeguards rather than on your consent. That is the order KVKK Art. 9 sets: without an adequacy decision, an appropriate safeguard, with explicit consent reserved for incidental transfers (Art. 9/6). The GDPR draws the same line — Art. 46 safeguards, Art. 49 derogations. No adequacy decision has been issued for any country in the table below.

The safeguard takes one of two forms, depending on the recipient: the standard contractual clauses (EU SCCs) or data processing agreement that recipient publishes and we have accepted; or, where there is none, the standard contract issued by the Turkish Personal Data Protection Board, signed with the recipient and notified to the Authority within five business days of signature. To learn which instrument covers a particular recipient, write to support@pathie.app.

Sharing, live location and crash reports are separate from this: they rest on your explicit consent, which you can withdraw at any time from Settings → Privacy and security → Consents. Sharing and live location are asked when you first share; crash reports have their own optional tick on the first-launch screen. That screen's required tick only records that you have read this notice; it is not consent to these transfers. Withdrawing the sharing permission also ends a live walk or live location you are sharing at that moment.

If you choose to sign in with Apple or Google, the only thing that company receives is which app you signed in to; what comes back to us is your name and email address (with Apple, optionally through a private relay address). This is a different processing operation from the geocoding row above.

Apple or Google processes the subscription payment under its own privacy terms. The store takes the payment card, collects the charge and issues the receipt or invoice; neither we nor RevenueCat sees your card details.

4. How long data is kept

• Your account and profile — until you delete your account.
• Routes, walks, photos and other items you shared — until you withdraw them or delete your account.
• Backup to your account — each phone's copy is kept until you delete it, turn backup off on that phone (which deletes its copy), or delete your account; it then stays in the server backups below until they expire.
• Rooms — you choose a room's lifetime when you create it. In a 24-hour room, the room and everything in it is deleted automatically when the time is up, and all that remains is a numeric summary that cannot be linked to anyone. An unlimited room is never deleted automatically: it stays until you or its founder closes it.
• Your conversation with your pet — kept on your phone and never written to the server in readable form: it reaches the server only inside your encrypted backup if you turn that on, and a reply you report goes with the report (see reports below). What is sent to the model to answer a message is not retained once the request ends; an attached photo is described and discarded.
• Reply ratings — when you give one of your pet's replies a thumb up or down, the thumb and your interface language are kept for 365 days, never the reply's text, and deleted at once when you delete your account.
• Sign-in codes — short-lived, and invalidated the moment they are used.
• Subscription status — while your account exists and for as long as the store requires for its own records.
• Cancellation survey — optional; the reason you pick and the sentence you write are kept for 365 days, and deleted at once when you delete your account.
• Reports and moderation records — the excerpt you attach when reporting content is deleted 90 days after the decision; the report itself and the decision are kept for 365 days for the appeal window. A removed item's quarantined copy is destroyed permanently after 30 days. When you delete your account, the reports you filed are deleted too; records of reports filed about you are kept until these periods expire. If the account is deleted while a ban on it is still running, two one-way digests stay until the ban ends, one of your email address and one of your sign-in account's id, so that signing up again does not lift it; they cannot say who you are (legitimate interest, GDPR Art. 6(1)(f); KVKK Art. 5/2-f).
• Server backups — every night an encrypted copy of the server database and of the stored photos and files is made and kept in Backblaze B2 storage in its EU Central region (Amsterdam, Netherlands). The contracting party is Backblaze, Inc., a US company; the copies are held in the EU. Daily copies are kept for 30 days; the copy made on the first day of each month is kept for 12 months. Data you delete, and the data of a deleted account, stays in these copies until they expire — at most 12 months — and goes with them.
• Data on your phone — until you delete it; the period is not ours to set.

5. Your rights

Under GDPR Art. 15–22 and KVKK Art. 11 you have the right to learn what data of yours is processed, to access it, to have it corrected or erased, to object to processing, and to receive your data in a portable form. Most of these can be exercised inside the app, without asking anyone:

• Export your data — Settings → Your data → "Download my data" saves everything on your phone in one encrypted file only you can open; "Download what the server holds" on the same page gives you a readable copy of every record the server keeps under your account. Reports and moderation decisions about you are kept apart and are not in it; write to us and we send you yours. A single route or walk can also be exported in an open, portable format (GPX or GeoJSON) from its own share screen, readable by other apps.
• Delete — Settings → Account → "Delete account", or Settings → Other → "Delete account or data" for all of it or only part. Even if you have uninstalled the app, you can delete your account from this page.
• Withdraw a share — you can unpublish a route you shared.
• Withdraw consent — Settings → Privacy and security → "Withdraw my consent". You do not have to delete anything to do this; your data stays where it is.

Server-side deletion is queued and normally completes within minutes; the screen does not say "deleted" until the work has actually finished. Copies already in the server backups leave them when those backups expire (see section 4). For written requests: support@pathie.app.

We answer a written request within 30 days (the KVKK application communiqué, Art. 6). A request under GDPR Art. 12(3) is answered within one month; where the request is complex that period may be extended by two further months, and you are told of the extension and its reason before the first month is out.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain: in Türkiye to the Personal Data Protection Authority (Nasuh Akar Mah. 1407. Sok. No: 4, 06520 Çankaya/Ankara), and in the EU and EEA to your own country's supervisory authority.

6. Security

• Your room messages, room photos, live location and backup are end-to-end encrypted; keys are generated on devices and never reach the server unwrapped.
• Access to photos is granted through short-lived signed URLs; it is not possible to reach someone else's content by guessing an address.
• All server-side storage and the database are provisioned with the "eu" jurisdiction restriction.
• Server logs contain no identifying information.

7. Age limit

You must be at least 16 years old to use Pathie. The app is not directed at children; people under 16 may not use Pathie and we do not knowingly collect their data.

8. If this document changes

Whenever the text changes materially, the app asks for your approval again — the document carries a version number, and raising it re-shows the screen. Changes are never made silently.