Terella — Privacy Policy
Effective 3 September 2026.
Terella is a globe you turn with your finger. It does not collect personal data about you.
That is unusually short to say, and the rest of this page exists to say it precisely rather than to pad it. Where something does leave your phone, it is described here even though it is not personal data, because a policy that only lists what is convenient is not worth reading.
What Terella collects
Nothing is collected by Terella or sent to its servers.
There is no account and no sign-in. There is no analytics library, no crash reporting service, no advertising, no in-app purchase, no advertising identifier, and no device identifier. Terella does not read your contacts, files, photos, calendar, camera, or microphone.
On a phone or tablet, Terella may ask for foreground location permission. If you allow it, the app takes one low-accuracy location reading when it opens and uses it on the device only to begin with your country facing you. The reading is not stored, logged, or sent anywhere, and Terella does not track your location in the background. If you decline, location services are unavailable, or a reading takes too long, the standard globe opening is used instead.
On Android the app requests INTERNET and approximate foreground location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION). It explicitly excludes precise location (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION).
What leaves your phone
One kind of thing: a request for a file.
Terella downloads a data file describing the state of the world — country news tone, event locations, earthquakes, hot spots, aurora, launches — plus, on first run, its map textures, ocean currents, and migration tracks. These come from the app's own address, gdelt.spacecat.watch, which is served by Cloudflare.
Three things are true of those requests and worth stating plainly:
- Every user asks for the same files. The payload is one file published on a schedule, identical for everyone who downloads it. The request carries no identifier, no cookie, and no body.
- Nothing you do in the app is transmitted. Turning the globe, tapping a country, switching layers, reading a card — all of it happens on your phone and none of it is sent anywhere. This includes the one-time opening location: it only changes the globe's initial direction. The app does not send a request when you touch it. There is no telemetry of any kind.
- Your phone never contacts the data sources. GDELT, USGS, NASA, NOAA, Open-Meteo, The Space Devs and Movebank are read by a server on a timer, and their data is republished as a single file. None of those services see your device.
As with any request to any website, the server that answers necessarily observes the connection: an IP address, the file requested, and the standard headers your phone's HTTP stack sends. This is inherent to how the internet works rather than something Terella adds, and it is handled by Cloudflare as the delivery network. That information is not used to build a profile, is not combined with anything else, is not sold, and is not shared. Cloudflare's own handling of network data is described in its privacy policy at https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/.
What Terella stores on your phone
Terella keeps a small cache so it opens fast and does not re-download the same map every time:
- The most recent data file, so the globe is drawn with real data on the very first frame even before the network answers.
- The map textures, ocean currents and migration tracks, which are versioned by filename and downloaded once.
- A single flag recording that you have seen the three introduction cards, so they are not shown again.
All of this stays on your device. None of it is uploaded. Clearing the app's storage or uninstalling the app removes it.
Children
Terella collects no data from anyone, including children. It contains no advertising, no purchases, no social features, no user-generated content, and no messaging.
Changes
If this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it. Terella carries no account, so there is no way to notify you inside the app; the current version is always at this address.