What Tessella stores

All of it stays on your device.

• Your visited countries and regions, with the dates and notes you enter.
• Your places, with their coordinates, category, your notes, ratings and any photos you attach.
• Your trips, with their titles, dates and summaries.
• Your settings: colour palette, language, display preferences.

Location access

Tessella asks for your location for two features.

• Saving a place. When you tap “I’m here”, the app reads your location once. Which country and region you are in is worked out on the device, from map data bundled inside the app, and works offline. Turning those coordinates into a street address does not: for that, the app asks Apple. See the next section.
• Automatic detection, if you turn it on. The app is then woken when you move a significant distance, so it can offer to add a country you have just arrived in. This is off by default and can be turned off at any time in Settings.

Every connection the app makes

Tessella talks to two companies, never to us. Here is the complete list.

• Turning coordinates into an address — Apple. Each time you save a place, on iPhone or on Apple Watch, the app sends those coordinates to Apple’s geocoding service to get a street address back. This happens as part of saving, not on a schedule. Apple handles it under its own privacy policy.
• Searching for a place — Apple. Searching queries Apple’s mapping servers, as the Maps app would. Apple receives your search term.
• Opening a Google Maps link — Google. When you paste a short link, the app follows the redirect to resolve the full address. Google receives that request.
• Importing a shared Google Maps list — Google. When you give the app a shared list, it downloads that list from Google. Google receives the request.

Syncing between your own devices goes through Apple’s iCloud, and your iPhone and Apple Watch also talk to each other directly, without any server. The app wakes in the background for arrival detection and for iCloud’s own sync notifications. Outside all of this, the app works offline. There is no analytics service, no advertising network and no third-party host of any kind.

Photo access

If you use the photo library import, Tessella reads the location and date stored in your photos to find the countries you have visited. No photo is ever uploaded. The app reads location metadata only, on the device. The images are neither copied nor transmitted, except those you explicitly attach to a place or a trip — and those stay inside the app.

iCloud

If iCloud is enabled on your device, your travel data syncs between your devices through your own private iCloud account. That database is managed by Apple, under Apple’s privacy policy, and we have no access to it. You can turn the sync off in your device’s iCloud settings.

The circle: what you share with other people

The circle is optional and does nothing until you create one or accept an invitation. It uses Apple’s own sharing, so the shared data lives in the iCloud accounts of the people in the circle — never in ours, and never publicly: only people you invite can open it.

What a member of your circle sees is a travel card, and only that:

• the nickname you choose, up to 24 characters;
• your list of countries with their status;
• how many places and how many cities you have saved;
• the date the card was taken.

What a member never sees: your places or their coordinates, your notes, your ratings, your photos, your trips, or your wish list. You can also send the same card as a code through Messages, with the same limits. Leaving the circle stops the sharing.

On-device writing

On supported devices, Tessella can write a trip’s title and summary, or suggest destinations. This uses the language model built into iOS and runs entirely on your device. No data is sent to any external service — not to Apple, not to us. It works without an internet connection.

The permissions the app asks for

On iPhone, three: location while you use the app, location also in the background (for arrival detection), and your photo library. On Apple Watch, one: location while you use the app. Notifications are requested when you turn on arrival detection. Siri needs no permission, and the widgets ask for nothing. Each one is optional and used only for the feature it belongs to.

What Tessella does not do

No advertising and no ad tracking. No analytics, no usage measurement. No account to create, no email address requested. No data sharing with third parties beyond the four connections named above. No selling of data — there is nothing to sell, because we hold none of it.

Your rights

At any time you can export all your data as a readable JSON file from the app’s settings, erase everything from the same place (deletion is immediate and permanent, and you choose whether your circle goes with it), or delete the app, which removes all local data. Data synced to iCloud can be removed from your device’s iCloud settings. Since no data reaches us, there is nothing to ask us to delete.

Children

Tessella is not directed at children and knowingly collects no information about them. Since we collect no data at all, the question does not arise in practice.

Changes

Any change to this policy will be posted on this page with a new update date. Significant changes will be flagged inside the app.

Contact

Nidello — Canada — [email protected]

Where this sits in law

Tessella is developed in Quebec, Canada, where the handling of personal information is governed by Law 25. No personal information is transmitted to us, so the obligations around retention, disclosure and destruction do not fall on us — you keep your data on your device. Where the app hands something to Apple or to Google, as listed above, that company’s own policy applies.