Privacy Policy

The Window Seater app

This section relates to privacy and data information specifically for the Window Seater app.

How it works

The Window Seater app tells audio stories to connect travellers to the world outside their window. Guides consist of a number of geolocated stories which are unlocked by your phone’s GPS.

Once on board a train or about to start a trip, click Start Trip. Your phone will then listen for nearby content.

The first time you do this you will need to:

  • Allow the app to access this device’s location
  • Allow the app to access your physical activity
  • Allow the app to access your location in the background (“Allow all the time”)

Why background access?

  • Whilst you are travelling Window Seater needs to run continually in the background so it can:
  • Check whether the device has recently moved
  • See where the phone is geolocated

If the device has moved it will check its geolocation to see if it is in range of a story.

To maintain battery life, the frequency of check-ins depends on recent movement (no movement = fewer check-ins) and the total route duration (guides over longer routes have less frequent check-ins).

When you move a certain distance from or off a route, the app will assume you’ve ended your trip and stop running in the background.

When you start a trip, Window Seater collects location and physical activity data even when the app is in the background, to check for nearby stories. It stops once you get to your destination, after a period of inactivity or when you click on the Stop Trip button.

Your data

Your movement and precise geolocation data (including background movement and location data) are not passed out of the app to Window Seater; it is only used to trigger content. We do not access, collect, use or share this data.

Once enabled you can pause background location tracking by clicking Stop Trip at any time.

App Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

The Window Seater website

This section pertains to the Window Seater website at https://windowseater.com

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Third party cookies

If you have consented via our cookies popup, we may use Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel and other tags for advertising and performance measurement.

Who we share your data with

We do not share personally identifiable data with any third party. Non identifiable, anonymised site usage data (e.g. types of pages viewed) may be collected via third party advertising tags in our site such as Facebook Pixel, in order to make our advertising campaigns more relevant to site visitors or to screen out existing site visitors.

No names, email addresses or other contact or personally identifiable information is shared.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Please send any request to admin@windowseater.com

~ For the travellers ~