Privacy Policy
Last updated: 29 August 2026
Ping is a personal daily companion app for Singapore: bus arrivals, a map, places you like, and people you want to stay in touch with.
On this page
This policy is short because Ping does very little with your data.
- Signing in is optional. Ping works completely without an account. You only need one if you want your places to survive a lost phone and reach your other devices.
- Your friends never leave your phone. Their names, phone numbers and anything you write about them stay on the device, always, even when everything else is syncing.
- If you sign in, your places, saved bus routes and visit history are kept in your own account so you can get them back. Nobody else can read them.
- We ask before uploading anything you already had. Signing in does not quietly copy your existing places anywhere.
- There is no analytics, no tracking and no advertising of any kind.
- We do not sell, share or transfer your personal data to anyone.
- Four features need the internet, and each sends only what it needs. All four are listed below.
What we collect
If you never sign in: nothing. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and no database anywhere holds anything about you. This is how Ping works out of the box, and it is a complete way to use it.
If you do sign in, two things are stored.
Your account: your name and email address, as given to us by Google or Apple, and an identifier that tells us which account is yours. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we receive a forwarding address rather than your real one, and we never send anything to it.
A copy of some of your data, so it survives a lost phone and reaches your other devices:
- your saved places, including your ratings and your own notes
- your saved bus routes
- your visit history
And that is all of it. In particular, your friends and your check-ins with them are never uploaded. See below, because that promise is worth being precise about.
Nothing is uploaded until you say so. When you first sign in with places already on your phone, Ping asks whether to add them to your account, and tells you how many there are. If you say no, they stay on the phone, and you can change your mind later in Settings.
What your phone sends out, and to whom
Ping works offline for the most part. The map, the roughly 9,000 bundled Singapore places, and everything you have saved all work with no connection. Four features reach the internet, and only when you use them.
1. Bus arrival times
When you view bus arrivals, your phone sends a bus stop code (and sometimes a bus service number) to a small service we run on Cloudflare, which passes it to LTA DataMall (Singapore's public transport data service) and returns the times.
Nothing identifying you is sent. To be straightforward about it: a bus stop code does indicate which stop you are interested in.
2. Travel times and address search
This is the one that involves your location, so it is worth reading.
When you use “Near me”, your phone sends your current coordinates and the coordinates of the place you are checking to OneMap, a mapping service run by the Singapore Land Authority, so it can work out how long the journey takes.
When you search for an address while adding a place, your phone sends the text you typed to the same service.
These requests go from your phone to OneMap directly. As with any website your phone contacts, OneMap can see your device's IP address. The requests carry a pass issued to Ping's OneMap developer account, not to you, so they do not identify you as an individual. What OneMap does with the request is covered by their own privacy policy.
Your location is used at the moment you ask for it and then discarded. Ping never saves your location, and Ping cannot see your location while it is closed. It does not have background location access.
3. Place details when you add a place
When you add a place, Ping can pre-fill its type, opening hours and dietary information so you do not have to type them. To do that it sends that place's coordinates to OpenStreetMap's Overpass service, a free public map database. You then confirm or correct whatever comes back.
4. The shared place list
Ping carries a shared list of eating places (what type they are, their website, their opening hours) put together from OpenStreetMap. Your phone downloads that list and looks things up on the phone, so we never learn which places you look at. When there is a newer version, your phone asks for "everything since version N" and nothing else.
5. A mistake you report
If you spot something wrong in that shared list, you can tap "Something here is wrong" and pick the field. That sends us the place, the field, and (for things like a website) what it should say instead. There is no free-text box, no account, and nothing about you goes with it.
We keep a scrambled, one-way stamp of the internet address the report came from, purely so that someone abusing it can be blocked. It cannot be turned back into an address, and it is not stored on your phone. Reports are deleted 90 days after they are dealt with.
Your own copy of a place is never changed by a report, and never sent anywhere.
6. Nothing else
That is the complete list.
What we never send
Your friends' names, phone numbers and any notes you write about them never leave your device. Neither do your check-ins with them.
This is true whether or not you sign in, and whether or not everything else is syncing. It is not a setting and you cannot switch it on by accident.
We are precise about this because it is other people's personal data, and they never agreed to anything. The app does not include them in what it uploads, and the server refuses them.
Your own position is never stored either: not on the phone, not in your account. It is read when you ask for travel times or the “you are here” marker, used for that, and forgotten.
Tracking and advertising
Ping contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no tracking software of any kind. We do not build a profile of you, and we have never sold your data or shared it with any advertiser, data broker or analytics company.
If you sign in, Google knows you signed in to Ping. It or Apple performs the sign-in, and Google runs the service that stores your account. That is the only company involved, it is not given your data for its own purposes, and it happens only if you choose to sign in. Nothing is shared with any advertiser, data broker or analytics company, ever.
Permissions
- Internet: for the four features above.
- Location: for the “you are here” marker on the map and for travel times. Ping asks the first time you use one of those features. If you decline, the rest of Ping is unaffected: the map, your places, bus arrivals and everything you have saved all keep working. Only the “you are here” marker and “Near me” need it, and Ping shows you how to turn it on if you change your mind.
Ping does not request background location and cannot read your position when it is not open.
Children
Ping is not directed at children.
Changes to this policy
If Ping starts doing something new with data, this policy is updated before that version is released, and the date at the top changes.
Deleting your data
On the device. Uninstalling Ping removes everything stored on the phone. Inside the app you can delete individual places, friends, routes and visits at any time; if you are signed in, deleting a place removes it from your account and your other devices too, and it does not come back.
Your account. There is a step-by-step page for all of this at Delete your data in Ping, including what to do if you have already uninstalled the app.
In the app: Settings → Account → Delete account. This removes your account, your sign-in details and everything stored in your account in the cloud. If you signed in with Apple, Ping also tells Apple to withdraw the permission you gave, so it disappears from your Apple ID settings rather than sitting there looking active.
Your places stay on your phone. They were yours before you had an account, and deleting the account does not take them. If you want them gone too, delete them in the app or uninstall it.
If any part of the deletion cannot be completed, nothing is deleted and Ping tells you so, rather than leaving you half-removed.
If you no longer have the app — you changed phone, or already uninstalled it — email benliente@gmail.com from the address you signed in with, and your account will be deleted for you. You are never locked out of deleting your own data by not having the phone any more.
Where it is kept. Synced data is stored in Google Firestore
in the asia-southeast1 region, which is Singapore.
What is kept, and for how long: your account and its synced data are kept until you delete them. Deleted items leave a marker for 180 days so that a device that was switched off does not restore something you removed; after that the marker goes too. Uninstalling the app removes everything stored on the device immediately.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or requests to delete an account: benliente@gmail.com
You can also ask what is held in your account, or ask for it to be corrected, at the same address.
If you are asking about an account, please write from the address you signed in with, so we can tell it is you asking.
Ping is an independent personal project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Land Transport Authority, the Singapore Land Authority, OneMap, or the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Bus arrival data is provided by LTA DataMall; mapping and routing by OneMap; place details by OpenStreetMap contributors.