Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 2026
The short version
Porta scans your photo library on your phone to find trips you have already taken. That scanning happens entirely on your device. Nothing is uploaded until you look at what we found and choose to import it. Everything else we hold is what you deliberately put in: your trips, your boards, your posts, your messages.
Photo library access
This is the permission that deserves the most explanation, so here is exactly what happens when you grant it.
- We read up to 8,000 photos from the last 24 months. We read their creation timestamps, and we sample GPS coordinates from roughly 160 of them spread across that timeline.
- From those samples we infer where you usually are, so that everyday photos near home are not mistaken for travel.
- Candidate trips are reverse-geocoded over the network to turn coordinates into place names. Those coordinates leave your device; your photos do not.
- All of the analysis is on-device. Only the trips you explicitly choose to import are ever uploaded, and only the photos in them.
You can decline photo access and still use Porta. You will build trips by hand instead.
Saving photos to your phone. When you tap Save on a photo in Porta, we ask iOS for permission to add photos to your library. That permission only lets Porta add photos; it does not let Porta read your library.
What we store
- Account: email address, username, display name, bio, an optional free-text location you type yourself, avatar and cover images, and whether your account is public or private.
- Trips: titles, destinations, dates, stops, itinerary items with your notes, prices, times and booking links, and the photos you import or upload.
- Boards: collaborative planning boards, who is a member, saved places, votes, and budgets.
- Posts and social: public posts and their images, likes, comments, who you follow, who you have blocked, and reports you file.
- Messages: your direct and group conversations, including photos sent in chat.
- Trip Studio: your conversation history with the AI planner.
- Operational: notifications, push tokens, crash reports, and usage events that tell us which screens are used and where people get stuck.
Photo metadata. Photos you upload keep whatever information the original file carried, which for most phone photos includes the GPS coordinates where it was taken. We do not currently strip that.
Who else sees your data
Porta is not sold to advertisers and your content is not used to train anyone's models. These are the services we send data to in order to make features work.
- Anthropic — when you use Trip Studio or other AI features, we send your messages, the relevant board or itinerary contents, and a summary of your trips so the assistant has context.
- Google Places — place searches, coordinates, and venue lookups.
- Sentry — crash reports, stack traces, device information, your IP address, and your Porta account identifier, sent automatically when something breaks. The account identifier is the same random ID your data is stored under, never your name or email; it is what lets us connect a crash to the problem you reported instead of guessing.
- Expo — push notification tokens and the contents of notifications we send you.
- Reverse geocoding — coordinates from candidate trips found during photo scanning, to turn them into place names.
- flagcdn.com — country codes, in order to display flags.
- Travelpayouts — our website (not the app) runs an affiliate script that rewrites travel links so we earn a commission if you book through one. It sees which links you click on this site.
Who can see what you post
One rule, everywhere: things start public and you can make them private. That is true of your account, of each trip card, and of each board. Nothing is an exception.
Your account can be limited to people who follow you, and individual trip cards carry their own setting on top of that. A board that is left public can be read by anyone who opens it, though only its members can ever change it.
Making a card does not post it. Sharing to Explore is a separate, deliberate step.
Photos in private conversations are stored privately and can only be opened by the people in that conversation. We check this on the server, not just in the app.
Shared cards. When you join a shared trip or event card, the photos you add to it can be seen by anyone who can see that card, and your name and photo appear in its list of people. Leaving the card removes your photos from it. Anyone who can see a photo on a card can save a copy to their own phone, and a copy someone has already saved stays with them even if you later remove the photo or delete your account.
Photos attached to trips and posts are served from URLs that do not require signing in. The addresses contain long random identifiers, but they are not secret: anyone with the exact URL can open the photo, and the file names inside an account's photo folder can be listed by someone who knows where to look. That is what makes sharing a trip work; it also means a photo on a private trip is reachable by URL even though the trip itself is hidden.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account from Edit Profile, inside the app. It is immediate and permanent: your profile, trips, photos, boards you own, posts, comments, follows, messages and uploaded files are removed, and the files are deleted from storage. There is no recovery.
Two things deliberately survive. Places are shared reference records with no owner, so they remain. And if someone saved a place from one of your trips onto their own board, that item stays on their board, because their board is theirs. Nothing identifying you remains attached to it.
Children
Porta is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.
Your choices
- Photo access, notifications and other permissions can be changed at any time in your device settings.
- Your account can be made private, and any individual card can be set to only you.
- You can delete your account, and everything with it, from inside the app.
- To ask what we hold about you or to have it removed another way, email hello@portatravel.com.
Changes
If we change how any of this works, we will update this page and change the date at the top.