Byzantine Trail — Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

Byzantine Trail is a catalog of Byzantine-era sites. It is designed to collect as little information as possible, and to keep what little it does handle within Apple’s iCloud wherever it can. This policy explains, in plain terms, what the app handles and why.

No tracking

The app contains no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no tracking of any kind. It does not use the Advertising Identifier (IDFA), it does not build a profile of you, and it never shares data with data brokers. There is no separate account to create and no password to manage — the app uses only the iCloud account already signed in on your device.

Information the app handles

Ratings you submit are public. When you rate a site (on a 1–10 scale), that rating and the site it applies to are stored in Apple’s CloudKit public database so that other users can see the community average. Your rating is associated with an anonymous iCloud identifier used only to let you edit or remove your own rating; it is not shown next to your name, and the app does not store your name or email with it.

Site suggestions are public and are sent to the developer for review. If you choose to suggest a site, the text you type (the site name and any optional location, notes, or links) is stored in Apple’s CloudKit public database and is also forwarded to the developer’s private issue tracker (hosted on GitHub) so the suggestion can be reviewed for possible inclusion. Suggestions carry no identifying information about you — only the text you enter is transmitted.

Your favorites, want-to-visit, and visited lists are private. These lists sync across your own devices through your personal iCloud account. They are stored in your private iCloud database, which the developer cannot read. They exist only for your own use across your devices.

App settings stay on your device. Preferences such as appearance (light/dark) and sort order, along with internal sync and rate-limit bookkeeping, are stored locally on your device using the system’s standard settings storage. This information never leaves your device.

Network connections and third-party hosting

To function, the app makes a few ordinary internet requests:

• Catalog updates are fetched from a static site hosted on GitHub Pages.
• Photographs are loaded from object storage hosted on Cloudflare R2.
• Ratings, suggestions, and your private lists are read from and written to Apple CloudKit, as described above.

As with any request over the internet, the services that host this content (Apple, GitHub, and Cloudflare) necessarily receive the standard technical information inherent to a network request, such as your device’s IP address. The app does not add any identifying information to these requests. How each provider handles that information is governed by its own privacy policy:

• Apple — apple.com/legal/privacy
• GitHub — GitHub General Privacy Statement
• Cloudflare — cloudflare.com/privacypolicy

Data retention and your choices

• You can change or remove your rating for any site at any time from within the app; removing it deletes the corresponding record.
• You can clear your favorites, want-to-visit, and visited lists by toggling them off in the app, and you can stop syncing them entirely by signing out of iCloud on your device.
• Suggestions, once submitted, cannot be withdrawn from within the app; you may ask for one to be removed using the contact method below.

Children’s privacy

Byzantine Trail is a general-audience reference app and is not directed at children. It does not knowingly collect personal information from children. The only user-generated data it handles — ratings and optional site suggestions — contains no personal information.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted here with a new “Last updated” date. Material changes will also be reflected in the copy of this policy shown inside the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or requests regarding a suggestion you submitted, can be raised through the app’s App Store listing or the contact form at byzantinetrail.com.