What Findway does with your data

No account needed

You never have to sign in to find a ward. Signing in is optional and only exists to carry saved places and the venues you have mapped between your devices. Without it, nothing about you is stored on a server.

Kept on your device

• The place you last had open, your map style and view, and whether you prefer step-free routes and spoken directions.
• Any places, floor plans and corridors you have mapped yourself, unless you chose to publish them.
• Places someone else published that you chose to hide from your list.
• A random identifier for this browser, used so that several people walking the same corridor can be counted as several people, and so that someone who publishes abusive places can be stopped from publishing more.

All of this is in your browser’s storage and goes when you clear it.

Your location

Your position is worked out on the phone, from GPS outside and from your steps and compass inside. It is used to draw the blue dot, to build routes and to advance directions as you walk. It is not sent anywhere while you browse the map.

While you are being guided, the path you walk is sent to the server as an anonymous corridor trace, tagged with the browser identifier above, so the map of that hospital can improve. On a deployment with no database it is discarded. This is the one place location leaves the device, and it starts when you press Start and stops when you stop navigating or arrive.

What is stored is the corridor, not the visit: the last 25 metres of every walk are cut off before it is saved, so the door you arrived at is not recorded; positions are rounded to about a metre; and every trace is deleted after 30 days. Searches that found nothing are deleted after 90 days.

Your data on this device

Sent to the server when you use a feature

• Address search. Typing something that is not a mapped place sends the text and your approximate position to the server, which asks a map provider for matching addresses.
• Searches that found nothing are recorded against the hospital, so the people who map it can see what visitors expected to find. Only the words typed are kept.
• Survey Mode and Upload plan send the camera frames or the plan image to the server, which passes them to an AI model to read signs and room labels. Both are things you start deliberately; frames are not kept after they are read.
• Map tiles for the street map are fetched from a map tile provider, which sees the request like any web server does.
• Places you publish. A public or unlisted place, and the points you add to it, are stored on the server so other people can open them, together with a one-way scramble of the browser identifier above, so that staff can stop someone who publishes abusive places. Delete a place you published from the places list and it is removed from the server.
• Reports and support messages. What you write, the place a report is about, and your email address if you give one, so the team can reply. Kept while the team deals with it and for 180 days after, and never more than a year.

Not collected

• No advertising or analytics trackers.
• No health information: the app knows the name of a ward, not why you are going there.
• No camera footage is stored on the server, and the camera is only used while a camera feature is open.

Where to ask

Questions about this summary, or requests about your data, go to the Findway team through the form on the Support page. Questions about how a particular hospital or organisation uses Findway go to that organisation.