Privacy
Firsthand is a walking app, so it needs to know where you are. This page says what that means, what leaves your phone, and how to stop it.
Location
Firsthand uses your precise location to play each part of a walk as you reach it, and to show which walks start near you. If you allow location Always, it keeps working with your screen off and can tell you when a walk starts near where you are.
Location is used continuously while a walk is running. That is the product: the audio is triggered by where you are standing.
Your first minute
When you first open Firsthand and allow location, the app sends your position, rounded to about a block (roughly 100 meters), to our server, and again only if you move a few hundred meters before the introduction ends. We use it to find true stories nearby from Wikipedia and other published sources, checked against those sources and written in our house style by our AI provider (Anthropic), and voiced by our narration provider (ElevenLabs).
To do that, our server passes a rounded position on to a few services. Wikipedia receives the block-rounded position to list articles nearby. routing.openstreetmap.de, an OpenStreetMap routing service, receives the center of a grid square about 330 meters across, to draw walking routes to the stories. When we search more widely for an area, Photon (run by komoot) and Nominatim (run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation) receive the center of a grid square about 1.2 kilometers across, or place names inside it, and Anthropic is told that same center and its street name. None of these services is told who you are.
We do not keep your position. What we keep is about places: the stories we found for each 330-meter square, the walking routes from that square's center, and a record of each 1.2-kilometer area we have searched. None of it is linked to you, your device or your account, and the next person in that square hears the same stories without another lookup.
The current app sends the position in the body of the request. Older versions put it in the web address, and our host (Vercel) keeps web addresses in its request logs for a short time, so a rounded position from an older version can appear there briefly.
If you give us a first name, it is sent to ElevenLabs as soon as you have typed it (when the field has been still for a moment, before you press Continue, so if you pause mid-word the part typed so far may be sent too), so it can be spoken back to you, and transcribed by ElevenLabs to check it was said clearly. We keep that recording by name only, so everyone called Ben hears the same file, and it is not linked to your device, account or location. If you say your name instead of typing it, your phone recognises it on the device and nothing is recorded.
Walking together
If you join someone else's walk with a code or a link, your phone shares its precise position and whether it is still connected with the other people on that walk, so the host can see where everyone is and wait for anyone behind. This goes through Supabase's live messaging service. It is only sent while you are in the group, it is not stored, and it stops when you leave.
Completed walks
When you finish a walk, Firsthand keeps a record of it: where the walk took you and when each part of the audio played. That record is how a walk gets sharpened, so directions that fire late or in the wrong place get fixed, and it is used for nothing else. Walks are free until enough people have walked them for that to happen. The record is linked to your account.
You can turn this off. Open Settings in the app and switch off Help improve Firsthand. The app works the same, and walks already finished stay on your phone.
The beta list
If you join the beta on this website, we keep your email address and, if you chose one, the city you would walk first. We use them to send your TestFlight invitation and for nothing else. To come off the list, use the form below and say so.
Your account
Signing in is optional. You can browse and take walks without an account; you need one to ask for a walk of your own or to vote on the next ones. You sign in with Sign in with Apple. We receive the name and email address Apple provides, and if you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address. We store your first name so walks can greet you by it, and a push token if you allow notifications.
What we do not do
- There are no analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. Nothing is measuring you on behalf of anybody else.
- We do not track you across other apps or websites, which is why Firsthand never asks for tracking permission.
- We do not sell or share your data with third parties for their own purposes.
- Firsthand does not use your microphone or your camera.
Who processes the data
App data is stored with Supabase, which hosts our database and handles sign-in on our behalf. Group walks use Supabase's live messaging. Our website and the service that finds a story near you run on Vercel. That service uses Wikipedia for the facts, Anthropic to choose and word one, ElevenLabs to voice it, and routing.openstreetmap.de, Photon (komoot) and Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) for walking routes and place lookups, each with a rounded position as described above. Audio files are downloaded to your phone for offline use. Apple handles Sign in with Apple and, if you enable them, push notifications.
How long we keep it
We keep your account and saved walks until you ask us to delete them. Completed-walk records are kept while they are useful for improving a walk, and are deleted with your account.
Deleting everything
Send this with the email address you signed in with. We will delete your account, your saved walks and any completed-walk records we hold.
Children
Firsthand is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we will say so in the app before it takes effect.
Contact
A real person reads every message.