Privacy policy

Last updated: 30 October 2026.

In short: Oteo has no accounts, ads or analytics, and we have no servers that store your data. What you save stays on your phone. To show you what is around you, the app asks public map, weather and encyclopedia services for information, and to do so it sends them the area you are in.

Who is responsible

Guillermo Jesús Álvarez Ibarra, creator of Oteo. Write to hola@oteoapp.com with any privacy question.

What stays only on your phone

Your history of places, your saved places, your settings and your game progress. They are not sent anywhere and are deleted if you uninstall the app.
Camera: the image is used only on screen to place the labels. It is not recorded or sent anywhere. If you take a screenshot, it is saved to your phone's gallery.
Voice: voice search uses the phone's own speech recognizer (for example, Google's on Android). Oteo only receives the recognized text and does not record or store audio. How the audio is handled depends on the provider of that recognizer.

What is sent to external services

Oteo needs your location to know what is in front of you. It uses it while the app is open; in the background, GPS is switched off. To find places and data, the app makes direct requests to these services, which receive the area or coordinates being looked up and, like any website, your IP address:

OpenStreetMap (Overpass and Nominatim): the area around you and what you type or say in the search box.
MET Norway (weather): the coordinates of your area.
Wikipedia and Wikidata: the name or code of the place you ask about.
Esri (satellite imagery) and Amazon Web Services (terrain): the map tiles of the area you are viewing.
adsb.lol (aircraft): the coordinates of your area and the search radius. adsbdb only receives the flight number.
CelesTrak (satellites) and Where the ISS at? (Space Station): they do not receive your location.

Each of these services has its own privacy policy. Oteo does not send them your name or anything that identifies you beyond the area looked up and your IP address.

If you tap "Search on Google", "Directions" or share a place, another app or the browser opens with that place, and that service's privacy policy applies from then on.

Permissions

Location: to know where you are and which way you are looking.
Camera: to show the labels over what you see.
Microphone: only if you use voice search.
Storage (older Android versions only): to save screenshots to the gallery.

You can remove any of these permissions in your phone's settings.

Children

Oteo does not collect personal data from anyone, including children.

Your rights

Since we do not store your data on any server, there is nothing we can access, correct or delete for you: everything is on your phone, and uninstalling the app deletes it. For any question, write to hola@oteoapp.com. You can also complain to your data protection authority.

Changes

If anything in this policy changes, we will publish it on this page with a new date.