Privacy Policy

The short version

Tarrow does not collect or store any personal data. Your location never leaves your device. There are no accounts, no analytics, and no tracking. Like every website, the pages reach you through a host that sees your IP address — see Hosting below.

What Tarrow does

Tarrow is a compass navigation app. You paste a destination — a map link, coordinates, or a Plus Code — and the app shows you the direction and distance to that destination using your device's GPS and compass sensors. Everything happens locally on your device.

Location data

Tarrow requests access to your device's location to calculate the direction and distance to your destination. Your location is used only on your device and is never transmitted to any server.

Network requests

Tarrow makes network requests only in three situations:

• Resolving map links: When you paste a Google Maps or Apple Maps short link, Tarrow sends that URL to its own server to resolve the destination coordinates. The URL you paste is sent to a Tarrow Cloudflare Worker, which fetches the link and extracts coordinates. No other information is sent.
• Resolving Plus Codes or place names: When a destination cannot be resolved from a URL alone, Tarrow may query the open-source Photon geocoding API (photon.komoot.io) with a place name or Plus Code to find coordinates. When Photon does not answer, the same text goes to Nominatim, the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s geocoder (nominatim.openstreetmap.org), instead.
• The map on “Pick on a map”: When you open the map on that page, your browser loads the map’s pieces, its fonts and its symbols directly from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org), a free service that draws OpenStreetMap data. Like any web server it receives your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at; its privacy policy says its regular logs keep no IP addresses. The map loads only when you open it. The point you take is not sent to anyone; it goes into your link.

None of these requests carries your own position or a device identifier. Each carries what its task needs: the link or text you entered, or the part of the map you are looking at. The address and link look-ups go through Tarrow’s own server: Photon and Nominatim receive the text you entered, not your IP address.

Hosting

The website and its small server run on Cloudflare. Like every web host, Cloudflare receives your IP address and the address of the page with each request — to deliver the page and to fend off attacks. It keeps aggregated traffic statistics for a few days: counts per page and per country, and the most frequent network addresses. We look at those counts only to see whether links are being used and to spot attacks. There are no request logs beyond that, no tracking script and no cookies. Cloudflare processes this on our behalf under its data processing terms.

Local storage

Tarrow saves your settings (units, theme, language, haptic preference) and saved places to your device's local storage. This data never leaves your device and is not accessible to any third party.

If you enter a name under Settings, it is stored the same way and added to the links you choose to share, so recipients can see who sent them. Leave it empty and nothing is added.

No analytics, no tracking

Tarrow contains no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash reporting service, and no third-party tracking of any kind. There are no cookies.

See for yourself

You do not have to take this page on trust. Open a shared Tarrow link on a laptop, open the browser's developer tools and switch to the Network tab. The page loads its files, and after that the list stays quiet, also once you allow location access: no request carries your position, because nothing is sent anywhere. A laptop shows no arrow, because it has no usable compass; on a phone, airplane mode is the simplest test: the arrow keeps working. The app behaves the same way.

Contact

Questions about privacy: hello@tarrow.dev