Privacy Policy

Overview

Gara AI (“Gara”) is an AI travel companion published by Blinkar. This policy explains, in plain terms, what the app collects, why, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it.

There are no accounts. You never give us a name you did not choose, an email address, or a password. The app identifies your device by a random id generated on first launch and stored in the iOS Keychain. Everything below is tied to that random id and nothing else.

What We Collect, and Whether We Keep It

• Location — Your coordinates, heading, and speed while the app is running, including in the background if you allow it. Live coordinates are used to answer you and are not kept as a track. Places where you stopped for a while are saved, as part of the day record described below.
• Conversations — What you ask and what Gara answers, by voice or by text. These are saved to a record of that day so the app still knows at 4pm what you discussed at 9am, and so your past days are readable in the Memories tab. They are kept until you delete them.
• Voice — When you tap the microphone, your speech is sent to Google's speech-to-text service and turned into text. The audio itself is not stored by us; the resulting text is treated like any other message.
• Photos — When you take a photo inside the app, it is sent to the AI so it can tell you what you are looking at. We do not store the photo on our servers. The app never reads your photo library.
• Your preferences — The display name you type, your language, interests, travel pace, dietary needs, and accessibility needs. Kept until you delete them.
• Your schedule and saved places — Events you add and places you star. Kept until you delete them.
• A learned summary of how you like to be spoken to — The app notices, for example, that you ask follow-up questions about architecture and give short answers about food, and writes itself a short note so it can talk to you better. This is kept with your day records.
• Purchases — Apple tells us that a Travel Day purchase succeeded and gives us a transaction id. We never see your card, your Apple ID, or your billing address.
• Device and diagnostics — Device model, OS version, app version, time zone, battery level, and a push notification token. Crash and error reports.

Why

All of it exists to make the guidance good:

• To answer questions about where you actually are
• To decide whether there is anything worth saying, and to say it
• To remember your day so you do not repeat yourself
• To work out routes and when you need to leave
• To keep the app working and to fix it when it breaks

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use it to build an advertising profile, and there are no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs in the app.

Who Else Sees It

To do its job the app has to pass some of your data to other companies. Each of them handles it under their own privacy policy:

• Google — Gemini (the AI that writes the answers), Places and Maps (nearby places and directions), Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech (your voice in, Gara's voice out), and Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications). Google states that data sent through the paid Gemini API is not used to train its models.
• SK Telecom (TMAP) and Kakao — used only inside South Korea, for transit routes and Korean place search.
• Open-Meteo — weather for your area. It receives a rounded, roughly 11km grid square, not your exact position.
• Apple — handles all payments. We never touch them.
• Sentry — crash and error reports.
• Railway — hosts the server your app talks to.

How Long We Keep It

Your day records, preferences, schedule, and saved places stay until you delete them. That is deliberate: the Memories tab is the app remembering your trips for you, and it would be worth nothing if it forgot. Everything else — live coordinates, audio, photos — is used in the moment and not retained by us.

Deleting Your Data

Open the app and tap Settings → Delete all my data. That erases everything described above from our servers — your day records, conversations, preferences, schedule, and saved places — and returns the app to a fresh install.

Deleting the app from your phone does not by itself erase what is on our server. Your device id lives in the iOS Keychain, which survives an uninstall on purpose, so that reinstalling does not lose your memories. If you want everything gone, use Settings first, or email us and we will do it for you.

Children

Gara is not designed for children and is not directed at anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, or object to how it is used. Because there are no accounts, the fastest route is the in-app delete described above. If you would rather we did it, email us from the address below and we will walk you through identifying your device.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top of this page and note the change in the app.

Contact

For privacy-related questions, contact us at admin@blinkar.dev.