Privacy policy

Last updated 16 September 2026

What’s That tells you about the places around you. To do that it has to know roughly where you are. This page explains exactly what happens to that information.

The short version

• There is no account. We never ask for your name, email, or phone number.
• Your location is sent to our server, and to Anthropic, to find nearby places and write stories about them.
• We don’t store your precise location.
• There are no ads, and we never sell your data.

Location

When you open the app, or drop a pin with “Somewhere else”, the app sends those coordinates to our server at api.whatsthat.fyi together with a list of nearby places found by Apple Maps on your phone. Our server uses the coordinates to look up nearby Wikipedia articles and to ask Anthropic’s Claude to choose and describe the most interesting places.

We use your coordinates only to answer that request. For usage statistics we keep them rounded to two decimal places (about one kilometer), and we never store your precise location.

Content generation

Stories and answers are written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. To write them we send Anthropic the place’s name and coordinates, your approximate city, the story you’re reading, and any follow-up question you type. Anthropic handles this under its commercial terms and does not use it to train its models. Stories can be wrong. The app shows its sources so you can check.

Stories about a place (not about you) are cached on our server for up to 90 days so the next visitor gets them instantly. Follow-up questions and their answers are not stored.

Your device

The first time you open the app, it uses Apple’s DeviceCheck or App Attest service to show our server that the request comes from a genuine copy of the app. Our server then issues a random token that identifies your installation. We store a hash of that token, the app version, and a count of stories and questions per day so we can enforce the daily limit. Daily counts are deleted after seven days.

Saved stories stay on your phone. We never receive them.

Read aloud

Stories are spoken by the voices built into iOS, on your phone. No audio is sent anywhere.

What we don’t do

• No advertising or tracking SDKs.
• No selling or sharing data with data brokers.
• No location history.

Deleting your data

Deleting the app removes everything on your phone. To remove your installation token and usage counts from our server, email muthu.vellayan@gmail.com.

Children

What’s That is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal information from them. The “For Kids” lens is meant for a parent to use with their child.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.