Privacy

What Spotwander keeps, and what it doesn’t

Spotwander is a free travel guide run by Intellicortex in Hyderabad, India. It shows no ads, sells no data, and works without an account. This page says plainly what is stored and why. Updated 10 November 2026.

Where you are

The home page and the map open near you. To find “near you” we use, in this order: a town you chose (kept in a cookie called sw_town for 180 days), your browser’s location if you allow it (never sent to us — the browser gives it to the page, which asks our server for the nearest town), or your network location: the country and city that our hosting provider (Cloudflare) attaches to the request, or a lookup of your IP address at ipinfo.io. We do not store IP addresses; the lookup result is cached for a day so the same visitor is not looked up twice.

Visits

We count visits ourselves: a random visitor id in a cookie, the pages viewed, the referrer, device and browser family, and the country. No IP address and no name is kept. Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity run on the site with IP anonymisation, so we can see where pages are slow or confusing; both skip our own team’s visits.

Accounts

An account is optional. It stores your email, a name, a salted password hash (or the id Google gives us when you sign in with Google), and the trips, saved places, stories and reports you make. Signing in sets a session cookie (bt_session). Delete your account from the account page and everything linked to it is removed; trips made without an account live in your browser only.

What you post

Status reports, reviews, stories and suggested edits are public and shown with the name you gave. Reviews and new places are checked by an editor before they appear. Write to us to have a post removed.

In your browser

The site remembers small preferences on your device — language, units, map region, places you looked at, photo lookups — in your browser’s local storage. Clearing site data removes them. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap and Esri, photos from Wikimedia, fonts from Google Fonts; those services see the requests your browser makes to them.

Contact

Questions or a removal request: contact us. Data sources and licences are on the credits page.