Privacy policy

Version 2 · in effect from 22 September 2026

Blip has no accounts. It never asks for your name, email address or phone number, and there is no profile to fill in. This page says exactly what is kept, because "we care about your privacy" is what everyone writes.

What Blip never collects

• No name, email address, phone number, password or account.
• No contacts, photos, calendar or advertising identifier.
• No analytics, no tracking SDKs, no third-party scripts — in the app or on this website.
• No location in the background. Blip can only see where you are while it is open, and the app ships with no background location permission at all. Anyone can check that on the App Store listing.

The one identifier there is

Your iPhone proves it is a real device using Apple's App Attest, which gives each installation a random key. We store a scrambled version of that key so we can slow down a device that is abusing Blip, and so your own reports stay yours to update or withdraw.

We are honest about what this is. It is not your name and it is not linked to your Apple Account, but it does single out one installation, and European data protection law treats that as personal data even when nobody can put a name to it. What it means in practice:

• We cannot tell who you are, where you live, or what else you do.
• We keep a record that a device reported in a given area, so the same device cannot report the same place twice over. In a busy area that says almost nothing; in a quiet one, fewer reports mean less cover, which is why reports are grouped into areas rather than points.
• Because we cannot identify you, we cannot look up "your" data if you ask us to, and the law does not require us to collect more information in order to be able to (GDPR Article 11). Deleting the app removes what is on your phone; reports expire on their own within 30 days.

What a report contains

• The area it belongs to — about 100 m across. The exact point you pressed is used to work out which area that is, and is then discarded. It is never stored.
• The city name, so reports can be grouped by region.
• The tags you chose, your note if you wrote one, and the time.

Your own position is used once, rounded to about 500 m, to check that the place you are reporting is within 2 km of you. It is not stored.

What other people see

Only totals for an area: how often it has been reported and which tags people chose. Notes are never shown to anyone else — that is what keeps Blip out of the business of moderating what people write about each other. Nothing on the map identifies who reported anything.

Official warnings

In Germany, Blip may also show official warnings from NINA, the federal warning system run by the BBK. Blip downloads every active warning in the country at once and your iPhone works out on its own whether any of them covers where you are. Your phone never contacts the warning service, so no authority learns that you use Blip or where you are, and neither do we. Which warnings you choose to show is kept on your iPhone.

When things are deleted

• Reports are deleted after 30 days.
• An area keeps a score that fades once people stop reporting it, so an old problem disappears on its own. That score is a number attached to a piece of ground, not to a person.
• Your own list of reports lives on your iPhone. Deleting the app deletes it.

Feedback

If you send feedback, we receive what you typed and — only if you leave that switch on — your iPhone model, iOS version and app version. No device identifier is stored with it, which is why we genuinely cannot reply to you.

Who processes what

Blip is run by Abhishek Singh (see the Impressum), who is the controller for this data. Processing rests on legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR): running a map people can contribute to anonymously, and keeping it usable by limiting abuse.

• Hetzner — servers in Germany, where the app's requests arrive.
• Supabase, running on AWS in Ireland — the database.
• Cloudflare — serves this website and handles the mail for [email protected]. Visiting this site means Cloudflare processes your IP address, as it does for any site it serves. There are no cookies and no analytics on it.
• Apple — App Attest, which issues the device key, and the App Store.

No data is sold, shared for advertising, or transferred outside the EU by us.

Your rights

You have the rights GDPR gives you, including access, correction, deletion, objection and complaint. As explained above, we hold nothing that lets us find your data on request, so the practical answer to most of them is that there is nothing for us to return. If you believe your data has been mishandled, you can complain to a supervisory authority — in our case the Hessischer Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, or the authority where you live.

Children

Blip is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.

Changes

Material changes to this policy are published here at least 30 days before they take effect, and the app shows you what changed. Every earlier version stays available.

Contact

[email protected]