Privacy Policy
Last updated: June 3, 2026
TrailSage AI is designed from the ground up as an offline-first mobile application. We believe your travel logs, locations, and conversations should remain yours alone.
1. The Offline-First Promise
All core functionalities of TrailSage AI are performed directly on your Android device. Downloaded tour packages, local Wikipedia metadata, offline vector maps, and speech synthesis files are stored locally on your internal storage.
2. Location Data & GPS Triggers
To trigger audio guides and stories as you travel, the app requests access to your device's precise location (GPS).
- On-Device Processing: Your coordinates are processed entirely on-device to calculate radius triggers and travel bearings.
- No Tracking or Selling: Location history is never sent to a cloud server, saved to an online database, or shared with/sold to third-party advertising services.
- Offline Maps: The vector map rendering utilizes locally stored PMTiles archives, requiring no online connections to refresh tiles while you explore.
3. Local LLM & Audio Speech Synthesis
Unlike typical travel assistants, TrailSage AI does not use external paid APIs (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini Cloud) to answer prompts or generate speech:
- Local AI RAG: Conversational RAG queries are processed on-device through the LiteRT-LM runtime and local quantized Gemma models.
- On-Device Voice Synthesis: Audio tours are synthesized locally using the Sherpa-ONNX native runtime and Piper VITS files. No audio clips or texts are transmitted online.
4. Optional Analytics & Developer Telemetry
To help us maintain application stability, TrailSage AI includes optional Firebase SDK dependencies (Analytics, Crashlytics, Performance Monitoring, Remote Config, and Cloud Messaging):
- Opt-In Setup: Telemetry collection is completely disabled by default. The application will not initialize these modules until you provide explicit consent during setup or inside Settings.
- Anonymized Data: If you opt in, Firebase collects anonymized crash logs, app responsiveness metrics, and basic device information to help identify performance regressions.
- Revocability: You can revoke your consent at any time from the app settings, which instantly terminates telemetry reporting.
5. Advertising & Rewards System (Google AdMob)
To support the development and maintenance of TrailSage AI while remaining a free app, we display ads using Google AdMob (Google Mobile Ads SDK).
- Ad Types: The application displays banner ads at the bottom of standard screens, occasional random interstitial ads during tab and screen transitions, and rewarded ads when initiated by the user.
- Rewarded Ad Credits: Users can voluntarily watch rewarded ads to earn credits (1 ad = 1 credit), up to a limit of 6 ads per day. Credits can be spent to disable all ads in the application (1 credit = 40 minutes of ad-free time, up to 6 credits/4 hours maximum per day). Ad-free status and available credits are stored and tracked locally on your device.
- Data Collection: Google AdMob may collect and process device identifiers, IP addresses, location data (if GPS permissions are enabled for the app), and other diagnostic or usage logs to serve, personalize, and measure ads. All data collected by AdMob is subject to Google's Privacy Policy.
6. Security & Verification
The application is fully open source. All downloadable model files and tour packages are verified via strict SHA-256 checksums inside local manifest templates to prevent asset tampering.
7. Changes to this Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes in our local toolsets. Any revisions will be pushed directly to our open-source codebase and static website.
8. Contact Information
For questions or feedback regarding our privacy practices, please submit an issue on our GitHub repository.