LOCA Maps works without an account and without you telling us who you are. Signing in is only needed to contribute something — a review, a photograph, a correction, a mission or an accident report — and what you contribute is meant to be seen by other people, which is the point of contributing it.
We do not sell your data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not build an advertising profile of you. There is no advertising in LOCA Maps.
LOCA COMPANY LIMITED, 7th Floor, Vientiane Plaza Hotel, Saylom Road, Vientiane, Lao PDR (“LOCA”, “we”, “us”) is the controller of the personal data described here.
Questions, requests and complaints: [email protected].
With your permission, the app uses your device's location to:
Journeys you navigate are recorded and sent to us when the journey ends. The record is the path travelled, when it started and finished, how far it went, and the names of the start and destination you chose. We use it to learn what roads are really like — where traffic slows, which turns take longer than the map thinks — which is how the routing improves.
A journey record carries a random identifier belonging to the installation of the app, not to you and not to your account. We do not connect it to your name, your phone number, or anything you have contributed. Removing the app and installing it again produces a new identifier with no link to the old one.
You may refuse location, or withdraw it later, in your device settings. The rest of the app continues to work; what stops working is the part that needs to know where you are.
With your permission, the app opens the camera or your photo library so you can attach a picture to something you are sending: a place you are adding, a business licence when you claim a business, the scene of an accident, or the photographs, 360 frames and clips a mission asks for.
Only the picture you choose is uploaded. The app does not read, index or upload the rest of your library.
A picture taken for a mission that asks for a 360 video is recorded with sound, because iOS and Android record sound with any video the camera takes. The app never records audio on its own and never listens in the background.
Pictures are stored in our own object storage and served from locamapsimage.loca.la. A picture that has been published has a public address: anyone with the link can open it, as with any picture on the web.
You can browse, search, route and download maps without an account. An account is needed only to contribute.
Signing in uses Login with Loca: you approve the sign-in in the Loca app, and Loca tells us that somebody approved it. We receive a pairwise identifier for you — a code that identifies you to LOCA Maps and is different from the code any other Loca partner receives — together with the name on your Loca account. No password and no Loca token ever reaches LOCA Maps.
After signing in you are asked once for a display name and a username. The username is the public handle your contributions carry. You may also set a picture. These are yours to change.
Your session ends when your Loca session does; signing out of Loca signs you out of LOCA Maps.
When you send a rating, a review, a photograph, a new place, a correction, a business claim or a mission photograph, we store what you sent, when, and the account that sent it.
Nothing is published before a person at LOCA has read it. Until then it is visible to you alone, marked as waiting. Once published, a review, a rating and a photograph appear on the place with the username and picture you chose — that is what publishing means. A correction or a new place changes the map itself and is not attributed to you on the map.
Accident reports are not published. They are read inside LOCA and are not shown to other users, on the map or anywhere else.
Contributions earn points. The leaderboard shows scores and ranks without names: you can see where you stand, and you cannot see who anybody else is. Your own row is the only one identified, and only to you.
You can delete your own review or your own photograph in the app. A place you corrected cannot be un-corrected by deleting anything, because the map has changed; write to us and we will deal with it.
If you allow notifications, we can tell you when something of yours has been published, when a mission you sent has been accepted, or when something needs your attention. This uses OneSignal, which holds a device token for your phone and the same pairwise identifier described above. You can withdraw the permission at any time in your device settings, or from the app's own settings.
None of this is sent to us. You can clear your history in the app, and removing the app removes all of it.
Our servers keep ordinary logs of requests — the address asked for, the time, the response, and the network address the request came from — to operate the service, to find faults and to stop abuse. Detailed request records are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically.
We do not sell personal data. It is shared only with the parties needed to run the service:
We may also disclose data where the law of the Lao PDR requires it.
Our servers are in Singapore and in Germany, and our content network has points of presence worldwide. Using the service therefore involves your data being processed outside Laos.
To ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted, write to [email protected]. We answer within 30 days.
How to have your account and its data deleted, step by step: maps.loca.la/delete-account.
LOCA Maps is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child has sent us something, write to us and we will delete it.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app and on this page, and the version and date above will change. The current version is always here.
LOCA COMPANY LIMITED, 7th Floor, Vientiane Plaza Hotel, Saylom Road, Vientiane, Lao PDR · [email protected]