Privacy policy

01 About Pop Cosmic

Pop Cosmic is a community map of what’s happening nearby. People drop signals — beacons, tags, secret spots — and a whimsical concierge helps you find them. The whole app is designed to work without knowing who you are.

This policy covers the Pop Cosmic mobile application and the popcosmic.com website. By using Pop Cosmic you accept the practices described here; if you don’t, please don’t use the app.

02 What we collect

Accounts in Pop Cosmic are optional. You can use the whole app — drop beacons, tag spots, talk to the concierge — without ever signing in. When you do, every contribution is associated with a randomly generated anonymous id that lives on your phone, not with a name, email, or profile.

If you choose to create an account, we collect as little as we can get away with while still making the account useful. The rest of this section walks through what that looks like in each part of the app.

2.1 Location

Pop Cosmic is, at its core, a shared map. To show you what’s happening nearby — and to put your contributions on the map for other people to find — we keep your location on our servers. It’s anonymous: attached to a random id generated on your phone, never to your name, email, or any personal identifier we could use to track a person.

• Your location is sent to our servers when you use the app and stored against your anonymous device id.
• That stored data is what makes the map work — nearby beacons, tagged spots, and the clustering that surfaces busy areas.
• We don’t link it to a name, email, social account, or any other identity, and we don’t sell it or share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• You can revoke location permission at any time in your phone’s settings. Most of the app stops being useful without it — it’s a map of where you are.

2.2 Things you drop on the map

When you tag a location or drop a beacon, the coordinates and any label or description you provide become part of the shared Pop Cosmic map for everyone else to find.

• Please don’t tag private homes, or put personal information into a label.
• Once it’s on the map, anyone using Pop Cosmic in that area can see it.
• Self-destructing beacons disappear on their own schedule. You can also delete anything you posted at any time.

2.3 Conversations with the concierge

Pop Cosmic includes an AI concierge that knows the time, the weather forecast, and what’s near your location. Conversations are processed in real time to give you a useful answer. The concierge sees the same anonymous id everything else does — not your name, not your email.

• Anonymized conversation data may be used to improve responses.
• We don’t use chat content to identify you personally.

2.4 Anonymous usage signals

Crash reports, performance metrics, and aggregate patterns about which features people use. None of it can be traced back to an individual. We use it only to make the app faster and less broken.

2.5 Accounts

Accounts are optional. They exist for people who want to keep their map contributions and preferences across devices, or to access optional paid features — not as a prerequisite for using Pop Cosmic.

When you choose to create one, we collect only what’s needed to make it work: a sign-in identifier (a Sign in with Apple or Google credential, or an email), a display name if you pick one, and any preferences you set. No profile photo requirement, no contacts upload, no social graph.

Any paid tier routes through your phone’s native subscription system (Google Play, the App Store) rather than through us, so your billing details stay with the platforms you already trust. The no-tracking, no-selling promises apply to account holders exactly the way they apply to everyone else.

2.6 Background location

With your permission, Pop Cosmic uses Android’s Geofencing API and iOS’s Region Monitoring API to notify you when you arrive at a place you bookmarked privately, a place a friend shared with you via a Secret tag, or a community tag near you that needs confirmation. The operating system performs the actual geofence watching; Pop Cosmic only receives a brief wake event when you cross into a region. Your location is not transmitted to our servers, not shared with other users by this mechanism, and not used for advertising or analytics.

• At most 20 regions are watched at any time, selected from your unlocked Secret tags, your Just-For-Me bookmarks, and the nearest community tags.
• Regions are recomputed when you move more than ~250 meters or when your unlocked set changes.
• You can disable this at any time in Settings → Notifications inside the app, or by revoking the background location permission in your device settings.

03 How we use what we have

Pretty much one thing: to make the app work and make it better. Specifically:

• Power the map and the concierge.
• Diagnose crashes, slow loads, and bugs.
• Improve the concierge’s responses using anonymized data.
• Build new features people actually want.
• Comply with the law when we’re required to.

05 When data leaves our systems

A short list of the limited circumstances where information goes anywhere other than us:

• Infrastructure providers: Cloud hosting, error tracking, and the language model behind the concierge. They’re contractually limited to processing data only to provide the service.
• The law: A valid court order, subpoena, or comparable legal demand. We push back where we can.
• Business transfer: If Pop Cosmic is ever acquired or merged, data goes with it under equivalent privacy commitments.

06 How long we keep things

• Location data: Stored on our servers tied to your anonymous device id, kept as part of the living map. Removed when you delete your tags/beacons or request full account/device deletion.
• Map contributions (tags, beacons, secret spots): kept as part of the shared map until you delete them, or until a self-destructing beacon’s timer runs out.
• Concierge chats: short-lived; used to generate your answer, then aged out.
• Anonymous usage data: kept in aggregated form. Can’t be traced back to an individual.
• Account data (if you have one): kept until you delete the account.

07 Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Know what we have about you.
• Delete your account and associated data. The fastest path is the dedicated account & data deletion page.
• Correct anything we’re storing inaccurately.
• Opt out of non-essential data collection where it applies.
• Revoke location permission at any time through your phone’s settings.

For any of these, write to support@popcosmic.atlassian.net. A real human reads it.

08 Children

Pop Cosmic isn’t built for kids under 13 (or 16 where local law sets a higher floor). We don’t knowingly collect data from anyone in that group. If you believe a child has used Pop Cosmic and we have their information, write to us and we’ll handle it.

09 Security

We use standard technical and organizational measures to keep data safe in transit and at rest. We also keep less of it in the first place, which is the strongest form of security available. No system is 100% safe; we don’t pretend otherwise.

10 Third-party services

Pop Cosmic relies on a handful of outside services — mapping providers, hosting, the language model behind the concierge. Each has its own privacy policy and its own data practices. We’ve chosen them to keep the chain short and the data minimal.

12 Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page when our practices change. The “Last updated” date at the top is the easy tell. If the change is material, we’ll surface it in the app before the new version takes effect.