Privacy Policy

Effective date: 19 August 2026 · Applies to the Detour Android application (package com.detour.app) and this website.

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.

2. What Detour collects

2.1 Microphone audio

Detour asks for microphone access the first time you use voice capture, and it records only when you tap the floating Detour button. There is no always-on listening, no wake word, and no background recording.

• A single capture is a short clip — about six seconds, and never more than fifteen — recorded as 16 kHz mono audio.
• The clip is written to Detour's private cache folder on your device. It is not placed in shared or external storage and no other app can read it.
• The clip is uploaded over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection to Detour's own backend, which forwards it to a speech-to-text provider (see section 5).
• The clip is deleted from your device once it has been transcribed, and also on every failure path. Anything left behind by an interrupted capture is cleared the next time the app starts.
• Detour's backend does not store the audio. It holds the clip in memory only for the length of the request.

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?

• The transcript exists in the app's memory for the duration of one capture. It is not written to Detour's database and it is not logged.
• Detour's backend does not store transcripts. Its server logs record the number of characters and the number of candidates, never the text itself.
• What ends up saved is only the place you confirm, under the name shown on the confirmation card — which you can edit before saving.

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 exactly like a transcript, to work out which place it refers to.

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 alongside the place so you can remember where you found it. Detour does not read your screen, your clipboard, or the contents of other apps.

2.4 Location

Detour asks for precise location permission and uses it in a deliberately narrow way:

• Detour reads the last known location already held by the Android system. It does not switch on GPS, does not request continuous updates, and does not track your movements.
• Location is read only at the moment you capture a place or ask for a route — never in the background and never while the app is idle.
• The coordinates are sent with that one request so that a search for "the bakery on the corner" finds results near you rather than on another continent, and so a route can be calculated from where you are.
• Your location is not stored by the app or by our backend. It is used for the request and then discarded.
• If you decline location permission, capture and routing still work — results are simply less well targeted.
• The current version does not request background location and contains no background location tracking.

2.5 Places you save

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

• the name you saved it under (suggested by Detour, editable by you) and any note you add;
• a category (restaurant, café, shop and so on), when one was identified;
• latitude and longitude, a street address, and the place's Google Places identifier — once you confirm a suggested match. These are what make it possible to tell, later, that the place is on your route;
• the package name of the app the content was shared from, when Android supplies it;
• how the place was created (share, voice button, or route screen), the date it was saved, and whether you have marked it as visited.

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.

One exception is outside Detour's control and worth knowing about: if you have Android's backup feature switched on for this app, Google may include Detour's app data in the encrypted backup of your device that is stored in your own Google account. That backup belongs to you and is governed by Google's Privacy Policy. You can turn it off, or delete an existing backup, in your Android system settings under Backup, and in your Google account's data settings.

2.6 Destinations and routes

When you ask Detour which saved places are on your way, the destination you type 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. The current version does not save your route history.

2.7 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, and where on the screen you last dragged it. Nothing here identifies you.

2.8 Technical information reaching our backend

Detour's backend runs as serverless functions on Supabase. 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 logs record only counts and lengths (for example "3 candidates, 62 characters"), never the content of a recording, a transcript, a place name or an address.

Requests carry no account, no device identifier and no login, so this technical information is not linked by us to a person or to a Detour user.

3. What Detour does not collect

• No accounts. There is no registration, no password, no email address, no profile. Nothing in the app asks who you are.
• No advertising identifier and no ad networks.
• No analytics. The current version contains no analytics SDK. Internally the app has an event interface that writes to the local developer log on debug builds only and sends nothing anywhere.
• No crash-reporting service. The current version does not include Firebase Crashlytics or any comparable SDK. If a crash report reaches us at all, it is only through the standard Android "send report" mechanism you can opt into with Google Play, which is handled by Google under its own policy.
• No contacts, photos, files, call logs, SMS or clipboard access.
• No screen reading. The current version installs no accessibility service and does not read the contents of other apps.
• No sale or rental of data, and no sharing of your saved places with other users or with businesses.

4. How information is used

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

• to turn a few seconds of speech into text, so you can save a place without typing;
• to recognise a place name in that text or in content you shared;
• to look up the real address and coordinates of a place you are about to save, so it can be matched to a route later;
• to keep your saved places on your device and show them to you;
• to calculate a route to a destination you enter, and to work out which of your saved places are along it;
• to hand a chosen destination to your navigation app;
• to keep the service working and to protect it against abuse of the backend endpoints.

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.

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. 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 place name — that is not tied by us to a person.

6. Data retention

7. Deleting your data

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

• Delete a single place — remove it from the saved places list in the app. It is deleted from the device immediately.
• Delete everything — Android Settings → Apps → Detour → Storage → Clear storage. This removes every saved place and every setting.
• Uninstall — removes all of Detour's local data, including any cached recording.
• Android backup — if you had backup enabled, delete the app's backup in your Google account's backup settings as well.

There is no account to delete, because there is no account. We hold no server-side copy of your places to delete on request. If you believe we nonetheless hold information about you, write to ranwerker@gmail.com 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.

The current version does not request background location and does not install an accessibility service. If a future version adds either, this policy and the app's Google Play listing will be updated before it ships, and the app will ask you for that permission explicitly.

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:

• All traffic between the app, our backend and every provider uses encrypted HTTPS connections.
• No provider API key is contained in the app. Keys are held only by the backend, so unpacking the app reveals no credential.
• Saved places and settings are stored in Detour's private app storage, which Android isolates from other apps.
• Recordings are written to private cache storage, never to shared storage, and are deleted after use.
• Our backend stores no request content, so there is no server-side collection of your places, recordings or transcripts to be exposed.

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:

• Access and portability — your saved places are visible in the app on your device; there is no server-side copy to request.
• Correction — edit a saved place's name or note in the app.
• Deletion — see section 7.
• Objection and restriction — refuse or revoke the microphone or location permission at any time in Android settings, or stop using the relevant feature.

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. 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, backend sync of saved places, crash reporting or analytics. 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.

13. Contact

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

See also the Terms of Use.