What's Where? Privacy Policy

Last updated: 11 September 2026

What’s Where? does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data. There is no account, no sign-in, no sync and no server of mine. The app makes no network connections at all, and nothing about the inside of your house comes to me.

It does put a copy of each photograph into your own Photos library, with what you said written into the file. That is the one thing that leaves the app, it goes to a place you already own, and the section below says what is in it.

The camera

What’s Where? photographs the container you are describing, so you have a dated picture of it. It asks for the camera the first time, behind a page saying why, and you can withdraw it in Settings.

The app never looks at the photograph. There is no object recognition, no face detection and no scene analysis. The picture is there so a person can recognise their own cupboard, which they do instantly and no model needs to help with.

Your voice

You describe a container out loud, because your own voice describing your things at a dated moment is what an insurer wants. Your words become text on this iPhone, using Apple’s on-device speech recognition and nothing else. On-device is a requirement rather than a preference here: where a language can only be recognised on a server, the app does without a transcript instead of posting the inside of somebody’s house away.

The recording is kept, as an audio file in the app’s own storage beside its transcript, because the recording is the record. It stays on the phone. It is never uploaded and never shared, and nothing in the app sends it anywhere.

What the app keeps, and where

In the app’s own storage on the phone: one file holding your rooms, your containers, what was said about each one, when it was said, and what was pulled out of it; and a folder of the photographs and the audio.

Apple’s on-device model reads a transcript and lists what is in the container. It runs here, as part of Apple Intelligence, and nothing about your things goes to Apple or to me. That list is an index over the record rather than a replacement for it. On a phone without Apple Intelligence the app still records photographs, dates and verbatim transcripts and still searches them, and the card says so in words.

The copy in Photos

Every photograph is also filed into an album in your Photos called What’s Where?, so you have a second copy somewhere you already back up and already know how to search.

Written into each of those files is the container’s number and name, the room, the sentence you said about it word for word, and the date it was recorded. That is what Photos shows as the caption and what Photos searches, so typing “sleeping bags” into Photos finds the cupboard under the stairs even with this app deleted. It is also why the copy is worth having: a photograph of a cupboard with nothing attached is a photograph of a cupboard.

What that means for you. Photos is yours rather than mine, and it goes where you have told it to go. If iCloud Photos is on, that copy and its caption sync to your iCloud and to your other devices under Apple’s privacy policy, along with everything else in your library. If it is off, the copy stays on the phone. Sharing one of those photographs shares the caption with it, because the words are inside the file. Nothing about that is the app talking to a server; it is your library behaving normally.

What’s Where? asks for full access to Photos rather than add-only because iOS has no add-only way to put a photograph into a named album: finding an album is a read of the library, and iOS ends a process that reads the library on add-only permission. What the app does with that access has not changed. It looks for its own album, makes it if it is not there, and writes into it. It never reads a photograph, never reads the album back, and never looks at anything else in your library. Answer “Keep Add Only” and the photographs still go in, captions and all, just loose rather than in the album.

What there is none of

No account, no sign-in, no sync of mine, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no in-app purchases, and no subscription. The app never asks for your location, so nothing in it knows where your house is.

Contact

Questions about this policy: email me at alex@alexecollins.com.

Help with the app itself is on the support page.