Privacy
Your trips are yours. Travel Timeline keeps your journeys in your own iCloud, on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac. There’s no account with us and no server of ours, no ads, no tracking and no analytics, and we don’t collect, sell or share anything about you.
Your journeys
- In your iCloud. Journeys, with their plans, places, notes, messages and costs, are stored on your devices and in your own iCloud (Apple’s CloudKit), under Apple’s privacy policy. We, Samal Studios, can’t see them.
- No account with us. There is nothing to sign up for. The apps send nothing to us, and contain no analytics, advertising or tracking code.
- Without iCloud, journeys stay only on your device.
Sharing a journey
- Sharing is your choice. When you share a journey, everyone on it can see and edit its plans, places, notes, messages and costs through iCloud. You can remove people or stop sharing at any time: People › Manage Sharing….
- Links and QR codes. A link or QR code made without an email lets anyone who has it join the journey and edit it. Send it only to your travel mates.
- Invitations by email. If you invite someone by email, the email is passed to Apple’s iCloud only to let that person’s Apple Account open the journey. Nothing is sent to the address, and we never receive it.
- Your name and photo. The name and photo you set in Settings are stored in each shared journey you can edit, and everyone on it sees them next to what you add. iCloud may also show them the name of your Apple Account.
- When you go. Leaving a journey someone shared with you (People › Leave Journey…, or on a Mac File › Leave Journey…) takes your name and photo out of it first. The plans and messages you added stay part of the journey, and the others see them as from “Someone”. Deleting the app doesn’t do this: your name and photo stay in every shared journey you’re on. So before you go, leave the journeys others shared with you, and remove your photo, which takes it out of your own journeys too: on iPhone and iPad, Settings (the gear in All Journeys) › Remove Photo, under your photo; on a Mac, Settings › click your photo › Remove Photo. Your name stays on a journey of yours until you delete it.
On your device
- Location is used only while you use the app, to show where you are on the map. There it isn’t saved, and it’s never sent to us or to iCloud. In Trail mode on iPhone and iPad, your location goes to your travel mates on that journey only when you share it, phone to phone: with Share Where I Am, or Share Once or Share Live when someone asks.
- Trail mode sends messages, voice messages, “Where are you?” questions and the locations you share phone to phone over Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, sealed with the journey’s key, so only phones on that journey can read them. A travel mate’s phone may pass them on to another. Nothing goes through a server or into iCloud. To phones nearby, a phone in Trail mode shows only a random name and a code that changes every day. Everything stays on the phones, outside backups, and is deleted a day after the trip, or a week after it was sent if that comes first.
- Local network and Bluetooth are used only by Invite Nearby and Trail mode, to reach your travel mates’ phones nearby.
- The microphone is used only to record voice messages in Trail mode, while you hold the record button.
- The camera is used only to scan a booking printout, or a journey’s QR code to join it. Pictures are read on your device and aren’t kept.
- Photos. The app sees only the screenshots and photos you pick, to read a booking or to use as your profile photo. It asks before it saves an invitation card or QR code to your photo library.
- Reading bookings. Emails, PDFs, screenshots and passes you add are read on your device: by Apple Intelligence’s on-device model where it is on (never sent to Apple’s servers), and by the app’s own reader otherwise. Their text isn’t kept; only the plans you add are saved in the journey. Bookings you share to Timeline from another app wait on your device until the app reads them, then they’re removed.
- Notifications are made on your device, when iCloud tells the app a shared journey changed, or when a Trail message arrives.
- Widgets, the Live Activity, Siri and Spotlight use a copy of your plans kept on your device. The Apple Watch app reads your journeys from your iCloud.
- Maps are Apple Maps. Showing a map and finding a place for an address are requests to Apple, under Apple’s privacy policy. Offline maps are pictures saved on your device.
Deleting your data
- A plan or a place: delete it in the app. It’s removed for everyone on the journey.
- A journey of yours: Delete Journey… removes it from your iCloud, and for everyone you shared it with.
- A journey shared with you: Leave Journey… takes it off your devices. It stays in the owner’s iCloud.
- Everything in iCloud: in Settings › your name › iCloud, open your storage, choose Timeline and delete its data. On a Mac, use System Settings › your name › iCloud. This deletes your journeys for everyone you shared them with.
- On iPhone and iPad: deleting the app removes everything it keeps on that device.
This website
- timeline.samalstudios.com sets no cookies of its own and has no analytics and no tracking. Our server keeps no access logs.
- The site is delivered through Cloudflare, which handles each visit, including your IP address, to deliver and protect the site, under Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
- Invitation links carry the invitation after the “#”, a part of the link browsers never send to a server, so we never see it.
If you email us, we use your address and message only to answer you, and keep them only as long as that takes. Depending on where you live, you can ask us what we hold about you and to delete it. Since your journeys are in your iCloud, not with us, that is only the email you sent.
Contact
Travel Timeline is made by Siamand Maroufi (Samal Studios), Hauffstr. 1, 10317 Berlin, Germany. See the legal notice.
For any question about your privacy or your data, email timeline.support@siamand.cc. If this policy changes, we update this page and its date.
Last updated 15 October 2026.