Whereabouts Open the app →
Privacy and data

What Whereabouts knows about you: nothing

Whereabouts is a free finder for named houses. It holds no personal information, keeps no accounts, and records nothing about who uses it or what they look up. Here is exactly how that works, for anyone who wants to check before relying on it or recommending it.

No personal dataNo names, no accounts, no sign-in, nothing about you is collected or stored.
Nothing you type leaves the phoneSearching happens entirely on your device. No cookies, no tracking.
No server to breachA static web page on a content network. There is no database behind it.

What it holds, and what it does not

Whereabouts contains one fixed, public reference set: house names taken from published village maps, a latitude and longitude for each house, and the map drawings as images. You type a house name and read the result. What you type is never recorded, never sent to a server, and never shared. There is no login, and there are no cookies.

Some of what people look up could be sensitive to them, so the app is built so that a search never becomes a record. The whole search runs on the device itself. Any usage counting is anonymous and aggregated, and it never captures which house anyone searched for.

How it is built and hosted

The app is a single web page served over a secure connection (HTTPS) from a content delivery network. There is no application running on a server while you use it, and no store of personal data anywhere, so there is nothing to be breached and nothing for anyone to log in to. The code is open source, which means anyone can read it and confirm for themselves that no information is sent away. Once the page has loaded, it works with no signal at all, which is the point in places where coverage drops but GPS keeps going.

Where the maps and locations come from

The village drawings are the work of Dr A Colin Day (colinday.co.uk), made freely available for copying and used here with his full support. Each drawing is shown in full with its own attribution. The house locations are original work, placed by hand from satellite imagery, and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. The software itself is open source under the MIT licence.

A word on accuracy

Every location is placed by hand, so occasionally one can be wrong, and some houses are only pinned to the centre of their village so far. A house pinned to an exact spot shows a solid red ring; one not yet placed shows an amber dashed ring and sends directions to the village centre, so the two are never mistaken. Where a name appears more than once in a village, the app says so. Treat it as a strong guide rather than a guarantee, and glance at the map before setting off. It is a navigation aid, not a substitute for local knowledge.