What Findway does with your data

No account needed

You never have to sign in to find a ward. Signing in is optional and only exists to carry saved places and the venues you have mapped between your devices. Without it, nothing about you is stored on a server.

Kept on your device

• The place you last had open, your map style and view, and whether you prefer step-free routes and spoken directions.
• Any places, floor plans and corridors you have mapped yourself, unless you chose to publish them.
• Places someone else published that you chose to hide from your list.
• The hospitals and places you opened recently, and the ones you saved, so the map can offer them again. Remove one with the cross beside it, or clear your browser's data.
• A random identifier for this browser, used so that several people walking the same corridor can be counted as several people, and so that someone who publishes abusive places can be stopped from publishing more.
• In the iPhone and Android apps only: the day you first opened Findway and the day you last opened it, so the app can tell the server “first open today” without saying who you are (see “Counting how Findway is used” below).

All of this is in your browser’s storage and goes when you clear it.

Your location

Your position is worked out on the phone, from GPS outside and from your steps and compass inside. It is used to draw the blue dot, to build routes and to advance directions as you walk. It is not sent anywhere while you browse the map.

While you are being guided, the path you walk is sent to the server as an anonymous corridor trace, tagged with the browser identifier above, so the map of that hospital can improve. On a deployment with no database it is discarded. This is the one place location leaves the device, and it starts when you press Start and stops when you stop navigating or arrive.

What is stored is the corridor, not the visit: the last 25 metres of every walk are cut off before it is saved, so the door you arrived at is not recorded; positions are rounded to about a metre; and every trace is deleted after 30 days. Searches that found nothing are deleted after 90 days.

Your data on this device

Sent to the server when you use a feature

• Address search. Typing something that is not a mapped place sends the text and your approximate position to the server, which asks a map provider for matching addresses.
• Searches that found nothing are recorded against the hospital, so the people who map it can see what visitors expected to find. Only the words typed are kept.
• Survey Mode and Upload plan send the camera frames or the plan image to the server, which passes them to an AI model to read signs and room labels. Both are things you start deliberately; frames are not kept after they are read.
• Voice search.Where your browser offers it, the microphone in the search box uses your browser's own speech recognition. Chrome sends what you say to Google, and Safari may send it to Apple, to turn it into text; Findway only receives the text. The apps don't offer it.
• Feedback. If you tap a face, which one, and the hospital you were in; it is counted, not linked to you. If you also write a note, the note, the hospital and its floor, and your email if you give one, so the team can reply. Both are kept like support messages (below).
• Map tiles for the street map are fetched from a map tile provider, which sees the request like any web server does.
• Places you publish. A public or unlisted place, and the points you add to it, are stored on the server so other people can open them, together with a one-way scramble of the browser identifier above, so that staff can stop someone who publishes abusive places. Delete a place you published from the places list and it is removed from the server.
• Reports and support messages. What you write, the place a report is about, and your email address if you give one, so the team can reply. Kept while the team deals with it and for 180 days after, and never more than a year.
• Visits from Findway's social posts.A link in one of Findway's own posts names the platform and the post (the utm_part of the address). When you open such a link, the server adds one to that post's count for the day, for the page you opened. Nothing else is kept: not your address, your device or anything that could tell one visitor from another, and no cookie is set. The counts are deleted after 400 days. If you go on to the App Store or Google Play from that page, the store is told which post you came from and reports installs per post to Findway, without saying who installed.
• Counting how Findway is used.So that we can see whether Findway is growing and helping people, the server counts, per day: page views and app opens; whether an open is a phone's first that day, week or month, and the week it first opened Findway; and how many hospitals were opened, routes planned, started and finished, QR codes scanned and routes shared. The app works these answers out itself and sends only yes or no, so nothing identifies you or your phone. Each count carries the country the request came from, not the address. On the website nothing is stored on your device for this: to count visitors, the address and browser are turned into a code that lasts one day and is then deleted with that day's salt, and the address itself is not kept. The counts are deleted after 400 days.
• Findway in ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants.When you ask an assistant to use Findway, it sends Findway the hospital and the place you asked about, and Findway answers with where it is and a link to directions. Findway does not receive your conversation, your name or your account, does not use anything else the assistant sends with the question, and does not keep the question once it has answered. It counts, per day, how many questions it answered for each assistant (ChatGPT, Claude and so on) and how many visits came from one, on the website or in the app: only the assistant's name, the kind of question and the day, never the question or anything about you. For that, the links in its answers name the assistant (via=), which is taken out of the address once counted. The counts are deleted after 400 days. The assistant's own privacy policy covers what it does with your conversation.

Not collected

• No advertising or analytics trackers.
• No health information: the app knows the name of a ward, not why you are going there.
• No camera footage is stored on the server, and the camera is only used while a camera feature is open.

Deleting your data

Findway, from Universal Wallet Ltd, has no accounts, so nothing the server holds carries your name. To delete what it holds from your phone:

1. Your walks. Open Your data on this device above (in the app: the ? button, then Privacy) and press Delete my walks from the server. Every corridor trace filed under this phone's identifier is deleted at once, and the identifier is forgotten.
2. Places you published. Open the places list and tap the bin beside the place. It is removed from the server with the points in it.
3. Anything else, such as a report or support message you sent, or a place you published from a phone you no longer have: use the form on the Support page, choose “Privacy or my data”, and say what to delete. We delete it within 30 days, and reply if you leave an email address.

If you ask for nothing, data is kept for these periods and then deleted:

• Corridor traces: 30 days.
• Searches that found nothing: 90 days. They carry no identifier, so they cannot be picked out for one person.
• Reports and support messages: 180 days after they are dealt with, never more than a year.
• Places you published: until you or the Findway team delete them.
• A publisher blocked for breaking the rules: the block is kept so that it holds, as a one-way scramble of the phone's identifier, not the identifier itself.

Where to ask

Questions about this summary, or requests about your data, go to the Findway team through the form on the Support page. Questions about how a particular hospital or organisation uses Findway go to that organisation.