Effective date: 6 September 2026 · Applies to the Android app "Tella" (com.sparkfall.tella) and the website tella.sparkfall.app, published by Sparkfall.
In short: Tella has no accounts, no ads, no analytics or tracking SDKs, and collects no personal information. Your location is used only to generate spoken narration about your surroundings, and it is never linked to your identity.
Location. While you use Tella (including with the screen off while the guide is running), the app reads your device's location to find out where you are and what is nearby. To do that, your coordinates are sent to:
Location is used transiently to answer each request. We do not build a history of where you have been, and no location data is linked to your identity. Tella does not request background location — location is only read while the app (or its visible guide notification) is running.
Anonymous device token. On first launch the app registers with our gateway and receives a random identifier. It contains no personal information and cannot be tied to you; it exists solely to enforce a fair daily usage limit. Usage counters are deleted automatically within about two days. Before they are deleted we add them into a daily total for all users combined — how many people used Tella, and how much of the daily allowance they used — so we can size that allowance sensibly. Those totals are just numbers: they contain no device token and nothing that could point back to you or your phone.
App integrity check. During registration the app may ask Google Play to attest that it is a genuine, unmodified copy of Tella (Google Play Integrity API). This check is handled by Google Play services under Google's privacy policy.
Speech. Narration is spoken using your device's built-in text-to-speech engine. The audio is generated on your phone and never uploaded.
tella.sparkfall.app shows Tella's explore mode in a browser: you pan a map, pick a place and hear its story. It uses no account, no cookies and no analytics. The point of the map you look at, and the place you pick, are sent to our gateway server to find nearby places and fetch or write that place's story; the search box sends your search text to Photon; map tiles are loaded from OpenStreetMap by your browser (which, like any website, lets OpenStreetMap see your IP address); place photographs come from Wikimedia Commons; the promo video is embedded from YouTube's no-cookie domain and loads only if you press play. The story is read aloud by your browser's own speech engine and never uploaded. To keep a fair daily usage limit without an account, the gateway derives a temporary identifier from a one-way hash of your IP address and the date; the address itself is not stored, and the identifier cannot be linked from one day to the next. Its usage counters are deleted within about two days, like the app's.
All network traffic uses HTTPS. Our servers keep no personally identifiable information; the only stored data about your device is short-lived usage counters keyed to the anonymous device token, plus the combined daily totals described above, which identify nobody. Settings stored on your phone (chosen language, narrator style, and the device token) are removed when you uninstall the app, and are excluded from Android cloud backups.
The services above process data under their own policies: OpenStreetMap Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, komoot (Photon), Cloudflare, DeepSeek, Google Play services.
Tella is a general-audience app and is not directed at children under 13. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
You can revoke the location permission at any time in Android settings (the guide simply stops narrating). Uninstalling the app removes all locally stored data.
If our data practices change, we will update this page and its effective date before the change takes effect.
Questions or requests: support@sparkfall.app