What Virgil knows about you.
Effective 7 August 2026 · Last updated 7 August 2026
The short version. Virgil has no accounts and no logins, shows no ads, and contains no third-party analytics or tracking code. Nothing is ever sold or shared with data brokers.
But Virgil is a navigation-shaped app, so it does need your location, and it does keep a record of where a trip went — an approximate route of each completed trip is uploaded to us and held for 90 days, tied to a random ID for your app installation rather than to your name. The detail is below, in the order it matters.
Who we are
Virgil is an iPhone app built and run by one person in Britain. For UK GDPR purposes that person is the data controller. There is no company behind it, and no staff other than the developer. Contact: dwisedevelopers@gmail.com.
What Virgil collects
Your location, while a trip is running
To tell you what you're passing, the app has to know where you are. While a trip is active — including in the background, so narration keeps working with your phone in your pocket — Virgil sends your current position, heading and speed to our server, along with a short prediction of where you'll be in the next few seconds, so a story can be prepared before you reach the thing it's about.
These live positions are used to answer the request and are not stored against you. Results are cached by a coarse grid cell of roughly 2.4 km, with no identifier attached, so the cache cannot be traced back to a person.
A summary of each completed trip
When a trip ends, the app uploads one record of it. We read these to judge whether Virgil is actually saying interesting things in the right places — it is the only way to tell good narration from bad without sitting in the car. It contains:
- An approximate route — one point roughly every 60 metres, with the trip's start and end times.
- The places narrated — each one's name, coordinates, the words you actually heard, and how far into the trip it played.
- Counts and timings — distance, duration, gaps between stories, and how often you skipped, paused, tapped "play now" or asked for more.
- Which voice you were listening to, and the app version.
Taken together, a route plus its timestamps can show when and where you travelled. We treat it as personal data, which is why it expires — see how long we keep things.
An installation ID
On first launch the app generates a random identifier (a UUID) and stores it on your device. It is not Apple's advertising identifier, is not linked to your Apple Account, and cannot be used to recognise you in any other app or website. Deleting and reinstalling Virgil creates a brand-new one, which permanently disconnects you from everything sent before.
It exists for three things: joining a trip record to its events, applying fair-use limits, and knowing which installation a subscription belongs to.
How you use the app
Virgil records a small set of events: the app being opened, onboarding finishing, whether you granted location permission, trips starting and completing, the first story in a trip, and taps on skip / pause / play-now / tell-me-more. It also records which voice you chose, when the subscription screen was shown, and whether a purchase succeeded or failed (with the product and, on failure, the reason).
Your subscription
If you subscribe to AI Voice, Apple handles the payment; we never see your card, address or Apple Account. Apple gives the app a signed receipt, which we verify and record against your installation ID together with the subscription's identifier and expiry date, so the app knows the voice is unlocked.
Your IP address
Like every website and app server, ours sees the IP address of each request. We use it in memory to apply fair-use limits — the only thing standing between an unauthenticated app and an unbounded bill — and we do not store it in our database. Our hosting provider keeps standard short-lived server logs.
Your email address, only if you offer it
If you enter your email on this website to hear about the launch, we store just that address. The app itself never asks for it.
Who else sees it
Virgil's stories are generated and spoken by services we don't own, so some data necessarily passes through them. Each one acts as our processor and none of them is permitted to use your data for their own purposes.
| Who | What reaches them |
|---|---|
| Anthropic (US) | The name and background of a place you're near, to write the words. No identifier and no route are sent. |
| OpenAI (US) | When AI Voice is on, the script of a story, to turn it into speech. No identifier, no location. |
| Apple | Map tiles and place searches, when you use the map (this is Apple Maps inside the app, governed by Apple's privacy policy). Also all payment handling. |
| Railway (US) | Hosts our server and database, so everything described above is stored there. |
There are no advertising networks, no analytics SDKs, no attribution or "growth" tools, and no data brokers. Virgil does not track you across other apps or websites, and does not ask for permission to, because it has nothing to ask for.
How long we keep things
- Trip routes: 90 days. After that the route is removed from the trip record automatically, leaving the anonymous statistics (distance, duration, what was narrated) behind.
- Trip statistics and app events: kept indefinitely as an anonymous record of how the app performs.
- Subscription records: kept while the subscription is live and for as long as tax and audit rules require afterwards.
- Cached stories and audio: kept indefinitely, but keyed on the place and the words — never on you.
- Waitlist email: until launch, or until you ask us to remove it.
Your choices
On your phone. iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services controls Virgil's access to your location at any time; withdrawing it stops narration but does not break the app. Inside Virgil, Settings → Privacy has a switch for sharing anonymous usage data: turn it off and neither the event records nor the trip upload described above leave your phone.
By email. Under UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to our using it, or complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. Write to dwisedevelopers@gmail.com and we'll respond within one month.
One honest limitation: because there are no accounts, the only thing connecting you to your data is the random installation ID. You'll find it in the app under Settings → Privacy → Request data deletion, where you can copy it — send it to us and we can find and delete your records. Without it we have no way to tell which data is yours, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. Deleting the app also works, in the sense that the ID is discarded and can never be linked to you again.
Children
Virgil isn't directed at children and we don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.
Changes to this policy
If we start collecting something new, we'll update this page and change the "last updated" date above. Material changes will also be surfaced in the app rather than left here quietly.