Pusula Maps is operated by ERT Investment LLC through Digital Infrastructure. This Privacy Policy explains how Pusula Maps (“we,” “us,” or “our”) handles information when you use our mobile application, website, navigation, search, account, friend, convoy, community, and AI features (collectively, the “Services”).
Questions and privacy requests may be sent to support@pusulamaps.com.
1. Privacy by Default
Navigation, place search, Favorites, and on-device driving features do not require a Pusula account. Location sharing is off until you choose to enable it.
Pusula Maps does not sell personal information, show advertising, or use personal information for cross-app tracking or targeted advertising.
2. Accounts and Profiles
An account is optional and is used for friends, Social Maps, and in-app convoy invitations. You may sign in with Apple, Google, or a verified email address and password.
Pusula stores your account identifier, username, display name, sign-in provider identifiers, email address when supplied by the provider or email flow, and an optional profile photo. Email passwords are stored only as salted password hashes and not as readable text.
Your profile photo, username, and display name may appear to other signed-in users in username search, friend requests, accepted-friend lists, convoy invitations, and shared Social Maps experiences.
Apple and Google process authentication information under their own privacy terms. Email verification and password-reset messages are delivered through Resend, which receives the destination email address and the message needed to deliver the email. Pusula does not silently merge accounts solely because two sign-in methods report the same email address.
3. Friends, Convoys, and Social Maps
Pusula stores pending and accepted friendships, blocked-account choices, convoy invitations, and group membership needed to provide social features. Friend requests require recipient acceptance, and only accepted friends can receive in-app convoy invitations.
Accepting a friend request, joining a group, or accepting an invitation does not by itself enable location sharing.
When you explicitly share location, Pusula processes the location, selected precision, display identity, group, and refresh time needed to show you to authorized participants. Approximate location is the default outside an active convoy. Shared positions expire when they are not refreshed, and signing out clears the device’s published group position.
Other participants may see and act on information you choose to share, so share only with people you trust.
4. Location
Pusula Maps uses precise location to show your position, rank nearby results around the visible map area, calculate and recalculate routes, provide turn-by-turn guidance, estimate arrival time, support optional Social Maps sharing, and place or confirm an optional community report.
You can change location permission in iPhone Settings and turn social sharing off inside the app.
5. Contacts and Calendar
Contacts access is optional. When connected, Pusula reads names and saved postal addresses on your iPhone so a contact’s home or work address can appear in search. Pusula does not upload your address book or use it to create friend connections. Only an address you select is sent to Apple to locate it.
Calendar access is optional. Calendar contents remain on the device and are used to suggest events that contain a physical location.
6. Maps, Search, and Navigation Providers
Mapbox provides the primary map, place search, route calculation, navigation, and related map services. Search text and a coordinate representing the visible search area are sent to Mapbox to return relevant results.
To improve place coverage, committed searches may also pass the query and approximate search area through Pusula’s App Attest-protected service to configured providers such as Foursquare, Yelp, TomTom, and HERE and to licensed Overture and OpenStreetMap indexes. Opening a result may request its provider record and a route to its entrance.
Provider responses are shown with applicable attribution and are not retained by Pusula as a combined business-profile database. Apple place search is used only in the separate Apple MapKit fallback mode and is displayed on Apple’s map. Mapbox SDKs may receive location and usage telemetry under Mapbox’s terms and privacy choices.
7. Pusula AI and Voice
Pusula AI is optional. When you submit a request, Pusula sends the request text, language, at most the previous conversation exchange, route-state flags, and limited details for places already shown to you through its protected service to OpenAI. GPS coordinates, destination coordinates, stop coordinates, and route geometry are not included in the AI request. Live place and route providers verify applicable results through the app’s normal search and navigation path.
The OpenAI credential remains on Pusula’s server and response storage is disabled. OpenAI does not use API inputs and outputs for training by default, but may retain them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring under its API data controls. Pusula does not log or persist AI request text or responses.
Voice requests use Apple’s speech-recognition services to produce text. Pusula does not save raw microphone audio. A resulting transcript is treated like a typed search or AI request and is sent only to the services needed to complete that request.
8. Community Reports
Submitting or confirming a community traffic report sends the report category, precise report location, time, vote, and an App Attest-protected pseudonymous installation identifier to Pusula’s service. The identifier is used for duplicate prevention, replay protection, abuse prevention, and moderation and is not shown publicly.
Reports expire by category and expired records are removed automatically. Pusula Maps is not an emergency service; do not include personal or emergency information in reports.
9. On-Device Information
Recent destinations, Favorites, appearance and navigation settings, planned routes, parked-car details, learned trips, driving summaries, and Journey Heat Map samples are stored in the app’s local container as applicable.
Search history, Heat Map data, and driving summaries remain on the device until you clear them using the available controls. Map and place-provider content is loaded as needed and is not retained by Pusula as a permanent provider-data archive.
10. Optional Usage Analytics
Usage Analytics is off by default. If you enable it in Settings, Pusula receives the app version, operating-system major version, platform, session duration, and aggregate counts for a limited allowlist of screens and actions such as opening Search, Heat Map, Social Maps, layers, Favorites, Pusula AI, route preview, navigation, Add Stop, and community reports.
This analytics feature does not send precise or approximate location, route geometry, origin, destination, search or AI request text, place names, contact or calendar information, profile or account information, advertising identifiers, raw tap coordinates, screen recordings, or an ordered interaction history.
Pusula processes these metrics through its own Cloudflare service and does not send them to Firebase Analytics, Google Analytics, or an advertising network. The analytics tables store only daily aggregate totals and do not contain a unique-user counter, installation identifier, account identifier, or analytics profile.
Aggregate totals are retained for up to 400 days. You may stop future in-app collection at any time in Settings. Website analytics counts visits to a small allowlist of public pages only as daily aggregate counters and does not store a visitor identifier in the analytics table.
11. Infrastructure, Security, and Retention
Pusula uses Cloudflare services, including Workers and D1, to operate protected account, friend, convoy, and community features. Account sessions are represented by opaque tokens stored in the iPhone Keychain and hashed on the server. Apple refresh tokens used for account deletion are encrypted on the server. App Attest is used to reduce automated abuse and bind protected requests to a legitimate app installation.
Account records remain until you delete the account. Session, verification, invitation, location, and abuse-prevention records expire or are removed according to their purpose. Verification codes expire after 10 minutes, account sessions expire after 30 days unless renewed, and convoy invitations expire at the earlier of the convoy’s expiration or 24 hours.
We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards intended to protect information. No method of storage or transmission can be guaranteed completely secure.
12. Your Choices and Account Deletion
You can remove friends, cancel or decline requests, stop location sharing, sign out, replace your profile photo, clear available on-device histories, revoke permissions in iPhone Settings, and delete your account from Account & Friends.
Account deletion removes the account profile and profile photo, sessions, friendships, invitations, and group memberships and ends groups owned by the account. For an Apple-linked account, Pusula also requests revocation of the applicable Apple token. Device-local Favorites and navigation history are separate and can be removed with their own controls or by deleting the app.
If law requires Pusula to retain a limited record, it will be kept only for the required period and purpose.
13. Privacy Rights and International Processing
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, receive, restrict, or object to processing of personal information, withdraw consent, or appeal a privacy decision. Contact us to make a request.
Information may be processed in the United States and other countries whose data-protection rules may differ from those where you live.
14. Children’s Privacy
The Services are not directed to children under 13, or a higher minimum age where local law requires it, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
15. Provider Policies
Third-party services have their own terms and privacy practices. Relevant policies include Mapbox at mapbox.com/legal/privacy, Apple at apple.com/legal/privacy, Google at policies.google.com/privacy, OpenAI at openai.com/policies/privacy-policy, Cloudflare at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy, and Resend at resend.com/legal/privacy-policy.
16. Changes and Contact
We may update this policy when features, providers, or legal requirements change. Material changes will be reflected by a new effective date and, when appropriate, an in-app notice or renewed acceptance.
Contact ERT Investment LLC at support@pusulamaps.com or through pusulamaps.com/contact.