Privacy policy
Thippu is made by GNOMON POINT PTY. LTD. (ACN 701 477 081, ABN 68 701 477 081) of Melbourne, Australia (“GnomonPoint”, “we”, “us”). This policy explains what personal information the Thippu app and thippu.com collect, why, where it goes, and the rights you have under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).
The short version: Your trips stay on your phone. Shared trips and backups are encrypted so we can’t read them. No ads, and we never sell data.
1. What we collect
Thippu keeps your trips on your phone. You can use it without an account, and then we don’t store your trips at all. We collect only what the features you use need:
- Your account — your email address, and the name and identifier Apple or Google share with us if you sign in with them. A random account ID links your data to your account.
- Shared trips — when you share a trip, its plans, notes, to-dos and expenses are encrypted on your phone before they’re sent, so we can’t read them. To make sharing work we also store the trip’s name, who is on it, their role (view or edit), the name each person shows to the group, and the email address of anyone you invite. If you join someone else’s trip, we also store the kind of phone you joined from (such as “iPhone”) and your phone’s current time zone, which the people on that trip can see, so they know your local time.
- Your backup — if you turn backup on, your trips are stored encrypted with your 12-word phrase (see “How backups work”).
- Saved emergency numbers — numbers you save to a shared trip are shared with everyone on that trip.
- Notifications — a push token for your phone, and short messages such as “Sam joined Lisbon” so we can tell you about activity on your shared trips.
- Purchases — when you buy a Thippu+ plan or a Mates Pass, Apple or Google take the payment. We receive a confirmation of what you bought, never your card details.
- An invite you tapped before installing (Android) — the first time the app opens, it reads the Google Play install details once to find a trip invite you tapped before installing. It reads only that invite; the install details aren’t sent to us.
- Usage and crash reports — only if you leave that switch on (see “Usage data you can switch off”).
We never collect your contacts, photos or GPS location, and we don’t read the notes, plans or expenses you type into a trip.
2. How backups work
When you back up, your trips are encrypted on your phone with a key made from your 12-word backup phrase, then stored on our servers. Only your phrase can open them. We never see the phrase, so we can’t read your backup, and we can’t reset the phrase for you.
If you lose the phrase you can make a new one in the app; the old phrase then stops working. Keep it somewhere safe, like a password manager. Backups need an account, so they’re tied to the account you sign in with.
3. Usage data you can switch off
If “Share anonymous usage & crash reports” is on, we also get:
- Crash details, from Sentry — what went wrong, on which screen, plus your phone model and app version. Email addresses and the parts of web addresses that could identify you are stripped before a report leaves your phone, the country it was sent from is removed, and no screenshots are attached.
- Which features are used, from PostHog — for example that a trip was created or an expense was saved, never what it said. We don’t record your screen, and PostHog doesn’t look up your location from your IP address.
Neither includes your name, email, trips, notes, places or amounts. Neither is linked to your account — each uses a random ID made for this install. Sentry and PostHog both store this data in the European Union.
The switch is on when you first open Thippu, and you can turn it off at any time in the app: on the privacy step, in Profile, or in Data & privacy. Turning it off stops both together.
4. Services that help run Thippu
We don’t sell personal information, and Thippu has no ads. We share data only with:
- Supabase — sign-in, shared-trip sync, backups, notifications and saved emergency numbers. Its servers for Thippu are in Japan.
- Sentry and PostHog — crash reports and usage, only while the switch is on; both in the European Union.
- RevenueCat — keeps track of the Thippu+ plans and Mates Passes your account owns, using your random account ID or, if you buy while signed out, a random ID RevenueCat makes for your phone. Its servers are in the United States. RevenueCat keeps that purchase record after you delete your Thippu account.
- Apple and Google — sign-in, payments through their stores (the App Store and Google Play Billing), and delivering notifications (Apple Push Notification service on iPhone, Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android). Notifications travel through Expo’s push service on the way to Apple or Google. On Android, receipt scan uses Google’s ML Kit, which reads the photo on your phone. The first time you scan, and each time after, ML Kit also sends Google an identifier for your phone, its model and Android version, Thippu’s app version, and how the scanner ran (for example, how long a scan took), so Google can keep it working. It never sends the photo or the words on it. The usage switch in section 3 doesn’t turn this off, but if you never scan a receipt, nothing is sent.
- Cloudflare — when you ask for an email sign-in link, Cloudflare runs an invisible check that you’re a person. It sees your IP address and browser signals for that check, and Thippu doesn’t get them.
- ZeptoMail by Zoho — sends your email sign-in link, so it receives your email address. Its servers for Thippu are in Australia.
- Weather, travel information, maps, place search and exchange rates — weather comes from Apple Weather through Thippu’s server, which receives only the place (rounded to about 11 km), never your account or name. To stop abuse, our server keeps a scrambled form of your IP address for up to 2 days. Travel advice comes from the government you choose and public holidays from Nager.Date, also through our server. To find a place, the app asks Apple Maps on iPhone or Photon by komoot on Android: it sends what you typed in the place search and, to rank nearby places first, your trip city’s position on the map. On iPhone, when you pick a place, its position goes to Apple to get its address in the local language. Directions open Apple Maps on iPhone or Google Maps on Android with the place you’re heading to; that app’s own privacy policy then applies. “Find your embassy” opens a Google search for your country’s embassy. On iPhone, “Translate for the driver” runs on your phone with Apple’s on-device translation; the text isn’t sent to us. Receipt scan reads the photo on your device. The photo is never uploaded or stored by Thippu. To convert money, the app asks open.er-api.com for your home currency. None of these requests include your account or name.
- Travel partners — Before you go can link to partners such as eSIM or insurance providers. Some links earn Thippu a small commission; it never changes your price. Once you open a partner’s site, its own privacy policy applies.
- Website providers — Cloudflare (hosting, forms, spam checks and visit counts), Zoho and Google Fonts, for thippu.com only (see “This website”).
- People you trip with — anyone you invite sees the trip content and permissions you’ve shared with them, nothing more.
- Authorities — where the law requires it, or to protect the rights, safety or property of GnomonPoint, our users or the public.
5. Where your data is stored
Your data is stored and processed outside Australia: Supabase in Japan, Sentry and PostHog in the European Union, RevenueCat in the United States, and our other providers wherever they run their services, which may include the United States. We take reasonable steps to make sure your information is handled consistently with the APPs, but as APP 8 requires we tell you that we can’t always guarantee an overseas recipient’s compliance, or that Australian law will apply to them.
6. How we use it
- To run your account, back up your trips and sync shared trips to the people on them.
- To send the reminders and notifications you’ve turned on.
- To check purchases made through the App Store or Google Play.
- To fix crashes and see which features help, if you’ve left usage and crash reports on.
- To answer your questions and keep Thippu secure.
- To meet our legal obligations.
7. Security
Connections between the app and our servers are encrypted. Shared trips and backups are encrypted on your phone before they’re sent, and the keys and your sign-in session are kept in your phone’s secure storage (the iOS Keychain or Android Keystore). No system is perfectly secure, but we work to keep your data safe and to act quickly if something goes wrong.
8. Deleting your data
You can delete your account any time in the app, in Profile → Delete account. That deletes your account, your backup and every trip you share through it, for everyone on those trips. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to remove Thippu’s access. Trips kept only on your phone stay on your phone until you delete them or the app.
We keep your information while your account is active and delete it when you delete the account, except records the law requires us to keep (such as purchase records). Crash reports are kept for up to 90 days and usage data for up to 12 months. Activity notifications on our servers are deleted after 30 days.
9. Your rights
Under the APPs you can ask us to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you.
- Correct information that’s wrong, out of date or incomplete.
- Delete your account and its data — directly in the app, or by emailing us.
To do any of these, use our contact form (choose “Privacy or your data”). If you’re not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.
10. Children
Thippu isn’t made for children, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 15 without a parent’s consent. If you think a child has given us personal information, contact us and we’ll remove it.
11. This website
thippu.com is an information page. It doesn’t use cookies for tracking or advertising, and the only analytics is Cloudflare Web Analytics (below). It collects personal information only when you send it to us:
- The waitlist form — your email address, and nothing else. We use it to send you an email when Thippu launches and a thank-you email for joining. We never sell it.
- The contact form — your name, email address, the topic you choose and your message. We use them only to reply to you.
Form submissions are stored with Cloudflare (Workers KV) and delivered to our inbox by email through Zoho (ZeptoMail / Zoho CPaaS, in its Australian data centre). Spam protection is provided by Cloudflare Turnstile, which may process your IP address and signals from your browser. The website is hosted on Cloudflare.
The site’s fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, so Google receives your IP address when your browser fetches them.
To count visits, the site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. It doesn’t use cookies or other storage in your browser, and it doesn’t follow you across sites. For each page view it records the page, the site that sent you, your browser and device type, how fast the page loaded, and your country, which Cloudflare works out from your IP address. We only see totals, never who you are.
To be removed from the waitlist, or to have your messages deleted, use our contact form (choose “Privacy or your data”).
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as Thippu changes. We’ll change the effective date above when we do, and tell you in the app before a significant change takes effect.
13. Contact
Questions, requests or complaints about this policy or your personal information: use our contact form (choose “Privacy or your data”), or write to GNOMON POINT PTY. LTD., Melbourne, Australia.