Rewind
Privacy Policy
Rewind is run by Nikolaus Sloop, an individual developer trading as Rewind, based in Maryland, United States. Where data protection law applies, that is the person responsible for your data — the "data controller". "We" and "us" below mean the same person. Reach us at rewind.support@gmail.com.
The short version
Rewind scans your camera roll on your phone to work out which days were a trip. That scan reads dates and locations already stored in your photos, and its results stay on the device.
A photo or video is uploaded only when you add it to a trip — and adding is always something you do: accepting a trip Rewind found, which uploads every photo it matched to that trip after telling you how many and asking what quality; picking photos for a trip yourself; or sharing a picture into Rewind and choosing a trip. Photos in trips you dismiss, and photos that belong to no trip, never leave the phone. A trip is private unless you decide otherwise: you can keep it to its members, open it to your friends, or make it public, and the same choice exists for your profile and your collections.
There is no advertising in Rewind, no analytics, and no tracking across apps or websites. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. If the app crashes, a report of the crash is sent so the fault can be fixed; it carries no personal data.
What never leaves your phone
- Your camera roll. Rewind reads your photo library to detect trips. The photos themselves, and the metadata of photos you never add to a trip, are never uploaded and never seen by us. Accepting a trip Rewind found is adding its photos, all of them, so the ones that stay are the ones in trips you dismiss and the ones that belong to no trip.
- The scan. Working out which days were a trip, which photos belong to one, and which photos are "home", happens on the device. Nothing is uploaded by the scan itself, and the count it shows you ("we found 38 photos from this trip") is counted on the phone.
- Songs and voice recordings. A song you pick for a film, or a voice note you record for one, stays on your phone. We store the song's title and artist and the timing of its beats so the film can be cut to it; the recording itself is never uploaded, and a film that carries it is cut on your phone.
- Stories you export. A story image is composed and captured on the device and never touches a server.
- Pictures handed to Rewind by another app. Something you share into Rewind from Photos or Safari waits on the device until you add it to a trip. If you never do, it is discarded.
- Cameras on your network. Importing from an Insta360 camera happens over your local network or the camera's own hotspot. Nothing about that connection leaves your phone.
What we collect
Everything in this table is stored on our servers. Nothing else is.
| Data | Why | When |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | Identify your account and sign you in | At sign-up |
| Phone number | Sign you in, if you chose SMS sign-in | Only if you use phone sign-in |
| The identifier Apple or Google gives us when you sign in with them, and with Apple the name and email you choose to share | Sign you in without a password | Only if you sign in that way |
| Display name and username | So the people you share with know who you are, and so friends can find you | At sign-up; editable later |
| Profile picture and the colour you pick for your markers | Shown beside what you add | Only if you set them |
| An approximate home location, rounded to about five kilometres before it is stored | The starting point of your films, and the home your trips are measured from | Only if you set it |
| Your visibility settings for your profile, each trip and each collection | To show each thing to exactly who you chose | As you set them |
| Photos and videos you add to a trip, and a smaller copy of each for previews | To store the trip, draw it on the map and cut films from it | When you add them |
| The capture time and GPS coordinates recorded inside those photos, plus their dimensions and duration | To place each item on the map and in the right order on the timeline | When you add them |
| What our analysis found in each photograph: a score for how good a moment it is, what kind of picture it is, whether it is sharp, and whether it is a screenshot | To pick the best moments for a film and to leave screenshots out | After you add them |
| Trip names, dates, places, member lists and who added what | To make the trip exist and be shareable | As you create and edit trips |
| Captions, drawings, graphics and the layout of films you make; the title and artist of a song you chose and the timing of its beats; lyrics looked up for it | To cut the film you asked for, and to cut it again the same way | As you edit |
| A score composed for a film, when you ask for one | So the film has music and does not have to be composed twice | When you ask |
| Workouts you import: type, start and end time, duration, distance, elevation, energy burned, and the GPS route | To draw the route alongside your photos | Only for workouts you pick — see below |
| Your Strava access token | To fetch the activities you ask us to import | Only if you connect Strava |
| Friend requests, friendships, who you follow, who you have blocked, and reports you send | To let you invite people, to tell you about their trips, and to keep people apart who should be | As you do each |
| Links you share to a trip, and who opened them | So a link can be revoked, and so you know who is looking | When you share a link |
| Push notification token and your per-category preferences | To send the notifications you left switched on, and a count on the app icon | On launch, if you allowed notifications |
| Your subscription status, bought edit credits, and whether a permission prompt was allowed or denied | To apply your plan's limits and not ask you twice | On purchase and on first launch |
| Which phone rendered a film (its model number), and the time the render took | To find faults in films cut on the phone | When a film is cut |
Location
Rewind's location data comes almost entirely from the coordinates already written into your photos by the camera that took them. The app also asks for your device's location so it can centre the map on you and, when you ask it to, place a photo that carries no location of its own. Those readings are used for the moment you asked and are not stored, except as the position written to that photo.
The home location is the one exception, and it is approximate by design: it is rounded to a grid of about five kilometres before it is ever written, and people who can see your profile can see it, because it is where your films start from.
Rewind does not track your location in the background. It has no background location capability at all; it cannot see where you are when it is closed.
Payments
Subscriptions and one-off purchases are sold by Apple, not by us. We never see your card details. Apple tells our payments provider that a purchase happened, and our provider tells our server which plan you are on — that is the whole of what we learn.
Health and fitness data
If you connect Apple Health, Rewind reads workouts and their GPS routes, and nothing else. It does not read heart rate, cadence, steps, weight, sleep, or any other health sample type. It does not write anything to Apple Health.
It reads only the dates of a trip you choose, and you select which workouts are imported. A workout you do not import is never uploaded.
A workout you do import is uploaded to our database — its type, times, distance, elevation, energy burned and route — because that is what lets the route be drawn on the trip's map and replayed alongside your photos.
We never use health or fitness data for advertising or marketing, and we never sell it or share it with data brokers. It is not disclosed to anyone except the infrastructure providers listed below that store it on our behalf, the map provider that draws a route in a rendered film, and the people who can see the trip it belongs to.
If you import from Strava instead, Strava may additionally supply per-second streams such as heart rate, cadence and power alongside the route, and those are stored with the activity. The paragraph above applies to them in exactly the same way.
How photographs are analysed and films are made
Some of what Rewind does with your photographs is done by machine, and it is worth being exact about which machine.
- Finding the moments. Smaller copies of the photographs and frames of the videos you add to a trip are sent to Google's Gemini models, which score each one, say what kind of picture it is, pick the best moments, and write the outline a film is cut to. The result is stored with the trip; the copies are not kept by Google.
- Composing a score. When you ask for music written for a film, a written description of the trip — its places, days and mood, no photographs — is sent to Google's Lyria model, which returns a piece of music we store with the film.
- Speech in your videos. To find things people say that are worth keeping, and to time lyrics to a song, speech is transcribed on our own render servers. It is not sent to any other company.
- Lyrics and songs. When you name a song for a film, your phone asks Deezer for its title, artwork and a thirty-second preview, and asks LRCLIB, a community lyrics catalogue, for its words. Both receive the title and artist you typed and nothing about you. The preview is used only to identify the song and measure its tempo; it is never part of a film.
- Maps in films. The maps that routes are drawn on in a rendered film come from Mapbox, which receives the area to draw. When a route is snapped to roads, the coordinates of that route are sent to Mapbox for the purpose.
None of this makes a decision about you. Nothing you add is used to train our models or, under the terms we use these services on, theirs.
What we don't do
- No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
- No analytics or product-measurement SDK.
- No tracking you across other companies' apps or websites.
- No selling your personal information, and no "sharing" of it for cross-context behavioural advertising as California law defines those terms.
- No profiling or automated decisions that have a legal effect on you.
There is crash reporting, through Sentry: when the app crashes, the stack trace, the model of your phone, its iOS version and the app's version are sent so the fault can be found. No account identity, no photographs, and no location go with it.
Who else processes it
Rewind is run by one person, so the infrastructure is other people's. These are the companies that handle your data on our behalf, and all they may do with it is what we ask.
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Our database, sign-in and file storage | Everything in the table above. This is where your account and trips live. |
| Amazon Web Services | Renders films and memories, draws route maps, analyses media | The photos and clips in a film, for as long as the render takes. The finished film is written back to our storage. |
| Sign in with Google, if you use it; the Gemini and Lyria models | For sign-in, your email address. For analysis, smaller copies of the photographs and video frames in a trip. For a score, a written description of the trip. | |
| Mapbox | The maps inside rendered films, and snapping a route to roads | The area of map to draw, and the coordinates of a route being snapped. |
| Deezer | Finds a song you name | The title and artist you typed, from your phone. |
| LRCLIB | Supplies lyrics for a song you name | The title and artist, from your phone. |
| RevenueCat | Manages subscriptions | Your account identifier and what you bought. No card details, which it never sees either. |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, payments, push delivery | What Apple already knows as the platform: your purchase, and the notification being delivered to your device. |
| Expo | App updates and push notification sending | Your device's push token and the text of a notification. No trip content. |
| Sentry | Crash reports | The crash, your phone's model and iOS version, and the app's version. Nothing that identifies you. |
| Strava | Supplies activities, if you connect it | Our request for your activities in a date range. Data flows from Strava to us; we send nothing of yours to Strava. |
Sharing to Instagram and elsewhere
If you export a film or a story to Instagram, or save one to your camera roll and share it from there, iOS hands the other app the file. That is a share you perform, and what happens to it afterwards is governed by that app's terms, not ours. We tell Instagram nothing about you.
Legal disclosure
We may disclose data if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety or to establish or defend a legal claim. If Rewind is ever sold or transferred, account data would transfer with it, and you would be told before that happened.
Legal bases
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, we rely on these grounds under the UK GDPR and GDPR:
- Performance of a contract — for your account, your trips, your uploads, the films we make from them, and your subscription. Without these we cannot provide the app.
- Consent — for your photo library, your device location, Apple Health, notifications, and connecting Strava. Each is a separate permission you grant, and each can be withdrawn in iOS Settings or in the app at any time. Health data is special category data and consent is the only basis we rely on for it.
- Legitimate interests — for keeping the service secure and preventing abuse, for acting on reports, for finding and fixing faults, and for keeping records of purchases.
- Legal obligation — where we must keep something, such as tax records of a purchase.
Withdrawing a permission does not delete what was already imported under it. You can delete that separately, or delete the whole account.
How long we keep it
- Your trips, media, films and activities — until you delete them, or until you delete your account. Deleting a trip deletes everything in it.
- Your account — until you delete it. We do not expire accounts for inactivity.
- A deleted account — removed from our live systems at once, and from the storage its files were in within a day. It may persist in encrypted backups for up to a further 30 days, after which those backups expire.
- Share links — until they expire or you revoke them. A revoked link stops working at once.
- Crash reports — 90 days, at Sentry.
- Reports you send about someone — until they have been acted on, and then as a record that they were.
- Purchase records — kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, typically six or seven years, even after the account is gone. These are records of a transaction, not trip content.
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, export it, restrict or object to how we use it, and withdraw a consent. You also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of them — Rewind works the same either way.
Much of this you can do yourself in the app: edit your profile, delete a photo or a trip, disconnect Strava, block someone, turn any permission off in iOS Settings, and delete the whole account from the Profile screen. For anything else, email rewind.support@gmail.com and we will respond within 30 days.
We do not charge for this, and we will not ask you for more identifying information than we need to be sure the request is yours.
If you are in the UK or EEA and think we have got this wrong, you can complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first so we can fix it.
Deleting your account
Open the Profile tab, scroll to the bottom, and tap Delete account. It asks twice, because there is no way back. It then removes your profile, every trip you own, everything you added to other people's trips, the activities you imported, your films, your friendships and follows, and your notification tokens, and signs you out. Your media cannot be recovered afterwards.
If you can no longer sign in, email rewind.support@gmail.com from the address on your account with the subject "Delete my Rewind account" and we will do it for you within 30 days, usually within a few working days, after confirming the request is yours. We will never ask for your password.
Deleting your Rewind account does not cancel an active subscription — Apple owns that relationship. Cancel it in Settings › [your name] › Subscriptions on your iPhone, and do it before you delete the account. The app reminds you of this when you have a paid plan.
Security
Your media sits in private storage — not a public bucket — and is reached through short-lived links minted for you at the moment you view it. Access is enforced by the database on every request, row by row, so being a member of one trip does not get you into another, and a trip you made public is public only to the extent you set. Traffic is encrypted in transit, and storage is encrypted at rest. Sign-in tokens are held in the iOS keychain.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data and the law requires us to tell you, we will, without undue delay.
International transfers
Our providers operate in the United States and elsewhere, so your data may be processed outside your country. Your account, trips and files are stored by Supabase in Oregon, United States; films are rendered by Amazon Web Services in Oregon, United States. Where data leaves the UK or EEA, transfers are covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, as incorporated in our agreements with each provider.
Children
Rewind is not for children. You must be at least 13 to use it, and at least 16 if you are in a country whose law sets that as the age of digital consent. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below that age. If you believe a child has given us their data, email us and we will delete it.
Changes
If this policy changes we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects what we do with data we already hold, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires consent we will ask for it rather than assume it.
Contact
Nikolaus Sloop, trading as Rewind · Maryland, United States. We aim to reply within two working days, and within 30 days for a formal data request.