Privacy Policy

Elite Places. Effective October 17, 2026.

Elite Places is a small independent app that helps you find highly rated places around you. This page describes exactly what the app stores, why it stores it, and how to have it removed. It is written to be read, not to protect the author.

The current native iPhone app is free for invited members. Some records and service features described below come from earlier versions or other service surfaces; their retention is disclosed even when the current app has no control for creating them.

Who is responsible

Elite Places is made and run by Zdeněk Čulík, an individual developer based in the Czech Republic. He is the data controller for everything described below, and the only person who answers the support address: support@eliteplaces.app.

What we collect

• Account. You can sign in with Apple, Google or email and password. Supabase handles authentication and stores your account identifier, email and sign-in credentials or provider identities. We store your profile name and avatar choice; Apple or Google may supply a name and profile picture URL. Signing in alone does not give access to the place catalogue: accepted invitation membership is required.
• Invitation waitlist contact. Before admission, you can save a contact email so we can tell you when you are approved to try Elite Places. We store that address, your account email, your account identifier and the time of the update. You can edit the contact address in onboarding without changing your sign-in email. The contact record is removed when your account is deleted.
• Your avatar choice. The avatar style you pick in Profile: its kind, the memoji you selected and the background colour.
• Historical approximate area. Earlier versions included a People leaderboard. If you appeared there, we store the name of the nearest large city to where you search, for example "Prague", not your coordinates. You can hide yourself from the leaderboard. These account records are removed with account deletion.
• Historical activity counters. Earlier service features recorded saved, visited and viewed counts and eligible invitation events for a leaderboard and rewards. Existing records remain until account deletion. The current native app keeps its liked-place list on your device and does not offer those leaderboard rewards. These counters are not a search history.
• Reviews submitted through other service surfaces or earlier versions. If you write a review, we store its rating, its text and the account that wrote it, so it can be shown next to the place and so it can be managed. The current native app displays stored place reviews but does not provide a review-writing control.
• Historical push notifications. Earlier versions could register the push token of your device and its account. The current native app does not register push notifications. Existing registrations are removed with account deletion.
• Bug reports from earlier versions or the feedback service. If you send feedback, we store the message you wrote, the screenshots you attached, your account email if you are signed in, the app version, the device model and iOS version, the part of the map you were looking at rounded to about one kilometre, and a short log of what the app did just before (which screens and server requests ran and whether they failed). The report is filed in the developer's private issue tracker on GitHub. The current native app opens the support contact rather than this feedback form. If you contact support, we receive the information you choose to send.
• City requests from the request service or earlier versions. If you ask us to add a city, we store the requested map area, its rounded geographic cell and your account id. This lets us count requests without counting one member repeatedly. It is deleted with your account.
• Historical purchases and access. This version is free for invited members and offers no purchases. We retain existing verified Apple transaction and product identifiers, purchase times, subscription periods, renewal and refund status, the price and currency Apple reports, and the access days credited to your account. See Purchases below.
• Repeat-offer prevention. We create keyed, one-way hashes of your verified sign-in identifiers to recognise a repeat historical free trial or promotional redemption. This version offers no trial. They hold the original trial start and promotional-use status, are readable only by the server, and are not used for advertising. After account deletion they are retained for 12 months and then removed by the scheduled cleanup. They contain no email address or photo.
• Invitations. Which code was issued to whom, who redeemed it and when, to establish membership and prevent reuse of a consumed code. Membership has no time limit.
• Wrong-profile reports. Reporting a venue's social profile records your account identifier and the reported venue, platform, handle and URL. These reports help hide incorrectly matched profiles. On account deletion, we replace the reporter identifier and clear the account reference on the hidden profile while keeping the moderation evidence and hidden state.

Location, advertising and privacy

• Location and searches. Your GPS position is used on your device to centre the map and compute distances. Search-area coordinates are also sent to the backend to answer searches and travel-area requests. Service caches and technical logs can retain request information beyond the immediate response, so this policy does not promise that precise coordinates never leave your device or are never retained by infrastructure. The app does not provide an account-based search-history feature. Earlier city requests, area-unlock records and voluntarily submitted bug reports can also contain location information as described above.
• Advertising and tracking. Elite Places has no advertising network integration or cross-app tracking feature. Sign-in services still process authentication and security data as described below.
• We never sell your data and never share it with anyone for marketing.

Historical purchases

The current app offers no payments. Earlier payments were handled entirely by Apple. We never see your card, your billing address or your Apple Account login. Apple can still send verified purchase and renewal details so that we can calculate access, restore it after a reinstall and process refunds. Your Elite Places account id is supplied to Apple as the purchase account token to link a purchase to the right account.

Permissions on your phone

• Location while using the app to centre the map on you and to compute distances.
• Selected photo when you choose an avatar with the system photo picker. The app receives only the image you select; it does not request access to your entire photo library. Avatar image bytes remain on your device.

Location and choosing a photo are optional. You can choose a prepared city manually without location permission. This native version has no camera, augmented-reality, motion or push-notification permission request. Earlier versions offered some of those features.

Avatar photos

The photo you choose for your avatar stays on your device. The app also provides built-in avatar choices. Your profile name and avatar-style metadata can be saved to the service, but selecting a local image does not upload that image.

Third parties

These are the companies that process data on our behalf, or whose content the app shows:

We require service providers that process personal data on our behalf to protect it to the same or a higher standard as this policy and the App Store Review Guidelines, including confidentiality, security and support for your data-protection rights. We remain responsible for the personal data we share with them and for responding to your requests about Elite Places.

If you choose Sign in with Apple or Google, that provider also processes sign-in and security information under its own privacy terms. Those terms explain the provider's processing and account controls; this policy governs the information Elite Places receives.

• Supabase hosts the database and handles sign-in. The current app's production account database is hosted in Australia (Sydney). The earlier service used a separate database in the European Union (Ireland). Hosting region does not mean every support, security or subprocessor activity takes place only in that region. See Supabase's data-processing terms.
• Vercel hosts the backend that the app talks to. See its data-processing terms.
• Cloudflare runs the domain and its DNS.
• Upstash was used for caching and rate limiting in earlier versions. The current backend uses local caches and Supabase Postgres for shared coordination instead.
• Apple handles Sign in with Apple and historical App Store payment events; earlier versions also used Apple push delivery.
• Expo handled push notifications for earlier versions. It is not a push SDK in the current native app.
• Google provides Sign in with Google and the place card shown in a place's detail. During Google sign-in, Google may collect the identifier associated with your sign-in consent and your IP address for authentication and fraud prevention. The IP address can indicate your approximate location. See Google's sign-in privacy information. The Google Sign-In SDK included in this version also declares linked data collection covering name, email address, phone number, approximate location, user and device identifiers, usage information and other data. Its privacy manifest lists app functionality for name, email address, phone number and approximate location; app functionality and analytics for user identifiers and other data; and analytics for device identifiers and usage information. Google declares that these uses are not tracking. These are the SDK provider's declared practices; they do not mean that Elite Places asks you to enter a phone number or receives every item. The information Elite Places receives from sign-in is described under Account above.
• GitHub stores bug reports submitted through the feedback service, in a private repository.
• Public Instagram profile data of venues obtained through a data provider. This is about venues, not about you.
• Third-party place data providers supply the place content shown in the app: names, ratings, review counts, opening hours and photos.

Website and cookies

The public pages on eliteplaces.app set no cookies and run no analytics, which is why there is no cookie banner. The owner-only spending dashboard sets a single login cookie, for the owner of the app and nobody else.

How long we keep it

Account data, avatar choice, reviews, counters, city requests and invitations are kept until you ask for deletion. Purchase and access records and the limited repeat-offer records are handled as described below. Push tokens are removed when they stop being valid, when unregistered or on account deletion. Bug reports are kept while the bug is open and are deleted once it is closed. They are stored separately in GitHub; contact support to remove a report or identifying text in it, because the in-app account deletion does not automatically enumerate those issues.

What is left after deletion

Deleting your account removes your profile, avatar choice, reviews, counters, legacy balances, push devices, city requests, invitations, the areas you unlocked, any report somebody wrote about you, and the sign-in itself. If you signed in with Apple, we ask Apple to revoke the access you granted this app, using the token we stored for that one purpose; if we hold no such token for you, there is nothing for us to send and the rest of the deletion is the same.

Some records stay behind, each with your account id replaced by a placeholder:

• The record that an App Store purchase happened, and the related access timeline, so the same purchase cannot be credited again to a new account and later refunds can be processed.
• The spending diary the app itself is billed against.
• A report you wrote about somebody else, so that the account you reported stays moderatable. Your account is replaced on it; the account you reported is not, because that row is about them. The reason you typed is kept as you wrote it, so if you put your own name or contact details in that text, they stay in it.
• Wrong-profile reports about venues keep the reported profile and moderation result. The reporter becomes a fresh placeholder and the hidden profile no longer stores your account identifier.
• The invitation rewards that the person who invited you had already earned, so that deleting your account does not remove their earned access or points, and the invite code you used, which stays marked as used so it cannot be redeemed again. Here the placeholder is derived from your old account id, and it is used to reconcile invitation rewards when Apple refunds or restores a qualifying payment, including a subscription or a 30-day pass.

These are kept for as long as the app exists. Every reference to YOUR account in them is replaced, and none of them carries your email address or your profile. (Other people's accounts stay on their own rows, which is what makes those rows theirs.) The one thing we cannot promise about is the free text of a report, above: we do not read it before keeping it, so we cannot say what is in it. Ask us and it will be removed.

Separately, the keyed sign-in hashes and a one-way marker of the deleted account are retained for 12 months to prevent repeat free trials and promotions. The marker also prevents an interrupted deletion from starting a new free week. These records hold the original trial date and deletion date, not your profile.

The usage counters the app meters itself with, including historical area measurements and previews, are deleted with the account too. Short-lived rate limits that stop a single account from sending too many requests are not deleted one by one; they expire by themselves within 24 hours.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be exported, object to how it is used, or ask for your account and everything attached to it to be deleted. You can delete the account yourself in the app: Profile > Settings > Delete account, or Account > Delete account before invitation admission. It removes your reviews, counters, profile, city requests, unlocked areas and sign-in. Access cannot be transferred to a replacement account. Deletion does not cancel an Apple subscription; cancellation is available in your Apple Account settings. What stays behind is listed under "What is left after deletion" above. You can also write to support@eliteplaces.app instead. There is no form and no waiting queue; the app is run by one person.

If you believe your data is handled wrongly, you can complain to the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection (Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, ÚOOÚ), Pplk. Sochora 27, 170 00 Praha 7, Czech Republic, or to the supervisory authority of the EU country you live in.

Children

The app is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us data, write to us and it will be removed.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the effective date above changes with it.

Contact

Zdeněk Čulík, Czech Republic. support@eliteplaces.app