Privacy Policy

Effective date: 12 September 2026 · Applies to the Detour Android application (package com.detour.application) and this website.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. What Detour collects
  3. What Detour does not collect
  4. How information is used
  5. Third-party services
  6. Data retention
  7. Deleting your data
  8. Android permissions
  9. Children
  10. Security
  11. International users and your rights
  12. Changes to this policy
  13. Contact

1. Introduction

Detour is an Android app that helps you save places you come across — in a video, an article, a message or a conversation — and shows you which of those saved places are along a route you are about to drive.

Detour is provided by Ran Werker, referred to in this policy as "we" or "us". This policy applies to everyone who uses the Detour Android app or visits this website, and it describes what the app actually does in the version currently published. Where a feature is planned but not built, it is not described here as if it existed.

The short version

2. What Detour collects

2.1 Microphone audio

Detour asks for microphone access the first time it needs to record, and it records only as the result of a press of the floating Detour button. There is no always-on listening, no wake word, and no background recording.

One case opens the microphone without you asking for it a second time. In Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, a press first reads the caption or title on screen, and if that names no place it then reads the text in a single still image of the screen (both are described in 2.4). Only if neither finds a place, and you have granted microphone permission, does Detour record — because in those apps the place is often said out loud rather than written. If you have not granted microphone permission, the press simply ends with the manual card instead.

2.2 Transcribed text

The transcription provider returns text, which Detour sends — again through its own backend — to a language model that answers a single question: does this text contain a place name, a category and a city?

2.3 Content you share into Detour

When you use the Android share sheet to send text or a link to Detour, the app receives whatever the sharing app provides — typically the text, a title and a URL — and processes it to work out which place it refers to. Up to about two thousand characters of that text are sent on for recognition.

Android may also tell Detour which app the share came from (its package name, for example com.google.android.youtube). When it does, that package name is saved on your device alongside the place, so you can remember where you found it, and it is sent with the recognition request — a caption from a video app and the title of a web page are different kinds of text, and saying which one it is helps Detour read it correctly. It is the name of an app, never of a person, and it is not stored by our backend or used to build any profile of you.

2.4 What Detour reads from your screen

Detour includes an accessibility service, which you switch on yourself in Android Settings and can switch off at any time. Android restricts it to a fixed list of apps, written into the app and visible to Google Play: outside that list Detour is given nothing at all, not even the name of the app you are in. It reads only at the moment you press the Detour button — never on a timer, never in the background.

In three of those apps the same service also taps for you, to reach the Android share sheet without you doing it by hand. That is described separately and in full in 2.5, because acting inside an app is a different thing from reading it. It never types anything, anywhere.

The list has four parts, and they are used for different things:

What the reader deliberately refuses to take, in every app on the list:

Detour reads the whole of the post or page you are on, not only the part currently scrolled into view. It used to stop at the edge of the screen, and that made saving a place depend on how far you happened to have scrolled: a caption collapsed behind “… more” keeps the restaurant's name in the half you cannot see, which is usually the half that matters. Reading only the visible part meant that pressing Detour on exactly the video you wanted often found nothing.

This changes how much is read, not what is refused. Everything in the list above is refused wherever it sits on the page — scrolling a password or a card field out of view does not make it readable, because being off screen was never what made those private. What is read is the post, the article or the caption you pressed Detour on. It is still read only at that press, still only in the apps listed above, and still never written down: it is used to work out which place you meant, and then discarded.

No messaging app is on the list. What is read is held in memory for the length of one capture, is never written to Detour's database and is never written to a log. Up to about two thousand characters of it are sent to our backend for place recognition, in the same way shared text is — see section 5 — and if the screen contained a link, the page behind it may be fetched as well (2.7). The only thing that survives the press is the place you choose to save.

One still image of the screen, in Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook only. A great many places are named in a picture rather than in text — a location sticker on a story, a caption burned into a video, a photograph of a menu or a shopfront — and none of those can be read from the screen's text. So in those four apps, and only there, if the reading described above finds no place at all, Detour asks Android for a single frame of the display and reads the text in it.

2.5 What Detour taps on your behalf

Instagram, Facebook and TikTok publish no web address anywhere Detour can read. The only thing in those apps that produces a shareable link is the app's own Share control, and the only route from there back to Detour is Android's share sheet. Doing that by hand is five taps, every time. So in those three apps — and nowhere else — a press of the Detour button can make those taps for you, using the same accessibility service described in 2.4.

This is the one thing Detour does that acts inside another app rather than reading it, so it is set out here in full.

What comes back at the end is an ordinary Android share — the same link and text you would have got by making those five taps yourself — and it is handled exactly like any other share, as described in 2.3.

Turning off Detour's accessibility service in Android Settings switches this off along with the screen reading in 2.4. The button then behaves as it did before: in those three apps a press falls back to the microphone or to a card you can type into.

2.6 Your clipboard

When you press the Detour button in an app Detour cannot read — which is most apps — the press falls back to your clipboard: Detour comes to the front and takes whatever text you last copied, so you can save a link you copied a moment ago. If the clipboard holds nothing usable, an empty card opens for you to type into.

This happens only on that press, never in the background, and Android 12 and later show you a "Detour pasted from your clipboard" notice when it does. The clipboard text is treated exactly like shared text: used for one recognition, never stored, never logged.

A link on its own rarely says which place it is about, so when a capture contains one, Detour's backend opens that link and reads the page. This is worth stating plainly because it is the one thing Detour does that reaches beyond your phone and our own providers.

2.8 Location

Detour asks for location permission — precise or approximate, both work — and uses it in a deliberately narrow way:

2.9 Places you save

A saved place is stored in Detour's database on your device and may contain:

In the current version, saved places are local to your device only. Detour does not copy them to our servers and they are not visible to us or to anyone else.

Detour switches Android's own backup off for its data. Its database and its settings file are excluded from both the encrypted device backup Google stores in your account and the device-to-device transfer that runs when you set up a new phone. In practice that means your saved places, your route sessions and your settings stay on the device they were created on and do not follow you to a new one — a deliberate trade, because there is no account to reconcile a restored copy against.

2.10 Destinations and routes

When you ask Detour which saved places are on your way, the destination — whether you typed it or Detour read it from Waze or Google Maps — and your current coordinates are sent through our backend to a directions provider, which returns the shape of the route. Detour uses that shape in memory to work out which saved places lie close to it.

Detour keeps a record of each route it plans, on your device. When a route is calculated, a route session is written to Detour's database containing:

This record exists for one purpose: it is the trip that a marked stop belongs to. When you tick a saved place and set off, Detour records that as a confirmed intent — the place, the moment you ticked it — attached to that route session. Nothing in the app reads these records back to you today, and the current version has no screen for viewing or deleting them individually; clearing the app's data or uninstalling removes them, as does deleting the saved place a marked stop belongs to.

Detour also remembers your most recent destination for a short time: its name, its coordinates, when it was saved, and which navigation app it came from. This exists because neither Waze nor Google Maps exposes its destination once turn-by-turn guidance has started, so without it, pressing Detour mid-drive could not tell where you were going. Detour stops using it after about three hours, and the stored value is removed as soon as a newer route replaces it or you end or discard the trip.

Both the route sessions and the remembered destination are local to your device only. Neither is copied to our servers, and we cannot see them.

2.11 App settings

Detour stores a small set of preferences on your device: whether you have completed the introduction, whether the floating button is switched on, where on the screen you last dragged it, whether the screen reader was switched on the last time Detour looked, and which permission prompts you have already been shown. Nothing here identifies you.

2.12 Technical information reaching our backend

Detour's backend runs as serverless functions on Supabase, in a European Union region. Like any internet service, it necessarily receives the technical details of each request — including your device's IP address, the time of the request and its size — and the hosting platform keeps operational logs of that traffic for a limited period for reliability and abuse prevention. Detour's own log lines record only counts and lengths (for example "3 candidates, 62 characters"), never the content of a recording, a transcript, a page, a place name or an address.

Two things are written to a database, and both are worth naming.

The first is an abuse counter. To stop anyone from running up the bill on the paid services behind these endpoints, the backend keeps a counter per caller. The row it keeps holds which endpoint was called, your IP address (for an IPv6 address, only the network part of it), and how much of the allowance is left. It holds no request content — no audio, no text, no place, no coordinates — and rows are deleted about a day after their last use.

The second is the product-usage events described in section 5: the same fixed set of counts and labels that go to Firebase, stored in Detour's own database so we can query them, together with a random install identifier the app generates on first run and the app's version number. The identifier is not derived from your device, your account or any advertising ID; it changes if you clear the app's data or reinstall, and it is the only way two events are known to come from the same installation. No place, address, coordinate, transcript or page text can be expressed in an event — the backend refuses any event or value outside the fixed vocabulary.

The recognition, transcription, place lookup, routing and screen-reading requests carry no account and no login. App versions released after 12 September 2026 send the same install identifier with them, in a request header, so that the abuse-prevention counter can be kept per installation rather than per network address — which is what stops one person's presses being throttled because thousands of other people share their mobile carrier's address. The backend turns the identifier into a one-way hash before it becomes a counter key, stores nothing you said, shared, saved or typed beside it, and sweeps the counters after a day. The providers in section 5 never receive it.

3. What Detour does not collect

4. How information is used

Detour uses the information described above only to make the app work:

Detour does not use your information to profile you, to advertise to you, or to train any AI model of ours. We have no such model.

5. Third-party services

Detour is built to keep provider keys off your phone: the app talks only to Detour's own backend, and the backend talks to the providers. The table below lists every external service the current version can reach and exactly what is sent.

Service Used for What is sent Policy
Google Firebase
(analytics)
Counting how often features are used, so we can tell what works. Release builds only — switched off entirely in development builds. Counts (how many suggestions were offered, how many stops were found), yes/no flags (was the suggestion kept, was a location available) and a fixed list of technical labels (which navigation app, which kind of app the button was pressed in, which step failed). Plus an app-instance identifier generated by Google, which is reset if you uninstall or clear the app's data. Never a place name, address, coordinate, transcript, page, note, destination or the name of the app you were in. firebase.google.com/support/privacy
Google Firebase
(Crashlytics)
Receiving crash reports and non-fatal errors so faults can be found and fixed. Release builds only. Stack traces, device model and Android version, and the app's own diagnostic messages, which are limited to identifiers, counts, durations and error types. One custom value is attached: whether the build has a backend configured at all. firebase.google.com/support/privacy
Supabase
(hosting, EU region)
Runs Detour's backend functions and holds Detour's own usage-event database. Every call below passes through it. The request itself, plus the usual network metadata such as your IP address, and the random install identifier in a header. Two things are stored: the abuse-prevention counters (keyed by your network address and by a one-way hash of the install identifier, kept for a day) and the usage events, both described in section 2.12. The events carry counts, flags and fixed labels with the install identifier and the app version — never a place, an address, a coordinate or any text you shared. supabase.com/privacy
OpenAI
(speech-to-text)
Converting your recording into text. The audio clip only. No account, no identifier, no location. openai.com/policies
OpenAI
(place recognition)
Finding a place name, category and city inside the text. The transcript, the text you shared, or the text read from your screen — up to about two thousand characters; the link, when there is one; the address the page gives for itself; the name of the app it came from; up to about 12,000 characters of the page behind that link; and your coordinates rounded to about ten metres, when location permission was granted. openai.com/policies
The website behind a link
(fetched by our backend)
Reading the page you shared or had on screen, so the place in it can be recognised. A request from our server for that one address. The site sees our backend, not you: no IP address of yours, no identifier, nothing about your device. See section 2.7. Each site's own policy
Google Places API Turning a recognised name into a real place with an address and coordinates. The candidate place name, a city, country, address or neighbourhood when known, and coordinates used to bias the search toward you. policies.google.com/privacy
Google Cloud Vision Reading the text in a still image of the screen, when a press in Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook found no place in the screen's text (see 2.4). One image of the display, taken at that press. It is held for the length of the request and is not stored by us. Only the text found in it goes any further. policies.google.com/privacy
Google Directions API Calculating the route you asked for. The destination — typed by you, or read from Waze or Google Maps — and the coordinates you are starting from. policies.google.com/privacy
Google Maps / Waze
(on your device)
Actually navigating, once you choose to go. Detour opens the app you pick with the destination coordinates. From that point the trip is handled by that app under its own policy. Google · Waze

Each provider processes what it receives under its own privacy terms, and each keeps data for its own operational periods, which we do not control. OpenAI states that content sent to its API is not used to train its models by default, and that it keeps a copy for a limited period — currently up to thirty days — for abuse monitoring (platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data). Providers may change: the app names none of them internally, so a provider can be replaced without an app update. This policy will be updated if that happens.

Because Detour sends no account and no identifier with these requests, a provider receives a fragment — an audio clip, a sentence, a page, a place name — that is not tied by us to a person.

6. Data retention

What Where it lives How long
Audio recordings Your device's private cache, briefly Deleted as soon as the capture ends — after transcription, after the place is saved, when the card is dismissed, and on every failure path. Leftovers cleared at next app start
Transcripts, shared text, screen text, clipboard text, fetched pages App memory during one capture, and our backend during one request Discarded when the capture ends. Never written to storage on either side, and never logged
Location coordinates Used in one request Not retained by our backend. Coordinates that form part of a planned route are kept on your device in the route session below
Saved places Detour's database on your device Until you delete the place, clear the app's data, or uninstall Detour
App settings Your device Until you clear the app's data or uninstall
Route sessions and marked stops Detour's database on your device Kept until you clear the app's data or uninstall Detour. Deleting a saved place also deletes the marked stops that belong to it. The current version deletes them on no other schedule and offers no in-app control for removing them individually
Remembered destination Detour's settings file on your device Stops being used after about three hours; removed when a newer route replaces it or you end or discard the trip
Backend request content Nowhere — nothing you send is written to a database Not retained
Abuse-prevention counter
(endpoint + IP address)
Supabase database Deleted about a day after the last request from that address
Usage events and install identifier
(counts, flags, fixed labels)
Detour's own Supabase database Kept while the product is measured. Deleted on request by install identifier (see section 7); the identifier itself is reset when you clear the app's data
Backend operational logs Supabase Kept for a limited period by the hosting platform under its own retention settings — currently a small number of days
Data held by providers OpenAI, Google Governed by each provider's own retention terms, linked above. OpenAI currently keeps API content for up to thirty days for abuse monitoring

7. Deleting your data

Because Detour keeps your places on your device, you are in direct control:

There is no account to delete, because there is no account. We hold no server-side copy of your places. The one thing we do hold is the usage events described in section 2.12, keyed by the app's install identifier. To have them deleted, open Settings in the app, note the identifier shown beside the version number, and write to ranwerker@gmail.com quoting it; clearing the app's data or reinstalling gives the app a new identifier and disconnects it from those rows. If you believe we hold anything else about you, write to the same address and we will look into it and reply.

8. Android permissions

Detour asks for each permission at the moment the feature needs it, not all at once at first launch. Every one of them can be refused, and can be changed later in Android Settings → Apps → Detour → Permissions. Refusing a permission disables the feature that needs it; it does not break the app.

Permission Why Detour asks
Accessibility service
Detour — acts on button press
Two things, both only when you press the Detour button. It reads the destination shown in Waze or Google Maps, and the page or post in front of you in a browser and a short list of reading and video apps; Android restricts the service to that list, it reads on demand only, and it refuses passwords and fields you type into. In Instagram, Facebook and TikTok it also taps the post's own Share control and then Detour's row in Android's share sheet, so one press does what used to take five — the minimum taps to reach that sheet, never sending to a person and never posting anything, and it types nothing anywhere. It is off until you switch it on in Android Settings. Turning it off means typing your destination by hand and copying a link before pressing. Full detail in section 2.4 and section 2.5.
Microphone
RECORD_AUDIO
To record the audio a press of the Detour button captures — up to a minute, and usually far less. Used only during that capture.
Location
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION
To read your position so place search is biased near you and a route can start from where you are. Both are declared so that answering "Approximate" in Android's dialog still works. Read on demand only; one fresh fix is requested when a route needs a current starting point.
Display over other apps
SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW
To draw the floating Detour button on top of whatever app you are using, so you can save a place without leaving it.
Notifications
POST_NOTIFICATIONS
Android requires a visible notification while the floating button is active, and Detour uses notifications to tell you what happened to a capture.
Foreground service
FOREGROUND_SERVICE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_SPECIAL_USE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MICROPHONE
Keeps the floating button on screen while you have it switched on, and lets a recording continue while you are inside another app. The microphone type is added only while a recording is actually running and dropped again afterwards, so Android's microphone indicator reflects what is really happening.
Vibration
VIBRATE
Short haptic feedback when a capture starts or finishes.
Internet and network state
INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
To reach Detour's backend for transcription, place recognition, place lookup and routes.

Two further permissions are granted at install time rather than asked for, because Android does not treat them as user-facing: WAKE_LOCK, which the analytics SDK uses to finish sending queued events, and an automatically generated permission that lets the app receive its own internal broadcasts. Neither reads anything about you. The advertising-identifier permissions that normally arrive with the analytics SDK are removed from the built app, so it cannot read an advertising ID even if it tried.

The current version does not request background location. The accessibility service listed above is switched off until you enable it yourself in Android Settings, and Android limits it to the apps named in section 2.4. If a future version widens what it reads, this policy and the app's Google Play listing will be updated before it ships, and the app will tell you inside the app what has changed.

9. Children

Detour is a driving and trip-planning tool intended for general audiences and is not directed to children. It is not designed for, marketed to, or intended to be used by children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since Detour has no accounts and collects no identifying information, we have no way to know a user's age. If you believe a child has provided information to us through Detour, contact ranwerker@gmail.com and we will act on it.

10. Security

We take a small number of concrete measures, and we would rather describe them plainly than promise perfection:

No method of transmission over the internet and no method of electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Anyone with physical access to an unlocked device can see the places saved on it.

11. International users and your rights

Detour is distributed through Google Play and can be installed in many countries. Depending on where you live, data-protection law may give you rights over personal data held about you — typically the right to access it, to correct it, to have it deleted, to object to or restrict its processing, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to complain to a supervisory authority.

In Detour's case those rights are mostly exercised directly on your device, because that is where the data is:

We do not hold an account, a profile, or any identifier that would let us find "your" data on request, which means that for most requests there is genuinely nothing on our side to produce or erase. The one exception is the short-lived abuse-prevention counter keyed to an IP address described in section 2.12; if you want that removed before it expires, tell us the address and roughly when you used the app. Where the law requires it, the controller of any processing described here is Ran Werker, and requests can be sent to ranwerker@gmail.com. We will respond within the period required by the law that applies to you.

International transfers. Detour's backend runs in a European Union region, and the providers it calls (OpenAI, Google) operate internationally, so a request may be processed on servers outside your country, including in the United States. Each provider maintains its own transfer safeguards, described in the policies linked in section 5.

California. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

12. Changes to this policy

Detour is under active development, and this policy will change when the app does — for example if a future version adds accounts or backend sync of saved places (a sync of saved places existed briefly in early September 2026 and was removed on 12 September 2026 before this policy was updated; rows it wrote have been deleted). When it changes we will update the effective date at the top of this page, and the current version will always be available at this address. Material changes will be highlighted here. Continuing to use Detour after a change means you accept the updated policy.

6 September 2026. Detour's accessibility service now taps as well as reads: in Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, a press of the button can activate the post's own Share control and then pick Detour from Android's share sheet, so that one press does what previously took five. Earlier versions of this policy said the service could not tap on your behalf, which was true when it was written and is no longer true. The new section 2.5 describes exactly what it taps, what it refuses to tap, and when it refuses to run at all. Android's share dialog was added to the list of windows the service can see, for the sole purpose of finding Detour's own row in it; nothing on that window is read or collected.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about how Detour handles data:

Ran Werker

Email: ranwerker@gmail.com

See also the Terms of Use.