Your location history is some of the most personal data there is.
This guide explains how Places treats it: where it is stored, who can see it, which outside services touch it and how to delete it.
Where your data is stored
On your iPhone. Places records your location and motion on the phone, then syncs your history to your account whenever it can.
In your Gyroscope account. Your history is kept on Gyroscope’s own servers and databases, which run on Amazon Web Services. That is what lets it survive a new phone and power your timeline, passport, analytics and coach.
With a few outside services, in small pieces. Foursquare receives your coordinates when you look for nearby places. Mapbox receives a travel line when you smooth it or snap it to roads. If you ask the coach a question, the AI provider receives the context needed to answer it, and we only work with providers that do not train on your data or keep it long term. None of them get access to your account.
In a share link, only if you make one. Copy link, X and email upload the card image so the link works, and only that image becomes public.
Private by default
Everything Places records is private to your account.
Nothing becomes public unless you choose to share a specific card, and a shared card shows only what you saw in its preview. The sharing guide covers what each card includes.
Why Places is a membership
Most services give things away for free, then sell your data and attention to the highest bidder.
Places works the other way. Your membership is what pays for the service. With Gyroscope, you are the customer, not the product being sold. This costs money, but we think it is worth it!
We have never sold data. There are no ads, ad trackers or advertising SDKs in the app. Members have paid for Gyroscope for 12 years, and that membership is the whole business.
In 15 months of location data from 1.5 million people, four points in time and place were enough to single out 95% of them, and making the data coarser helped surprisingly little. (de Montjoye et al., Scientific Reports, 2013). Removing names from location data does little to hide who it belongs to, which is why your history is never sold.
A detailed location history is a lot of data to store and protect for years. Free accounts keep the last 30 days.
The premium membership includes unlimited storage, so you can keep all your history: every city, every route and every day at home, for years or decades.
Places Unlimited stores unlimited places and travel history, while One and Max expand that further to thousands of trackers and biometrics.
Exporting and deleting your data
You can export your data from Export your data in your account, which opens gyrosco.pe/export. Visits come out as a spreadsheet file, and travels as a spreadsheet or a GPX file for mapping apps.
To remove a single stop, open it and tap Delete this visit. Trips have Delete this trip.
To delete everything, open your account and tap Delete account. Deletion is permanent, and your account and stored history cannot be restored afterward.
If you subscribed through the App Store, cancel the subscription there as well, since Apple handles that billing.
Questions
The full details are in the privacy policy. If anything is unclear, email support@gyrosco.pe and someone on the team will answer.