Privacy Policy

Published by Meiwin Fu, Whenbus is a bus arrival times app for Singapore. This policy explains what the app and this website do with your information.

The short version

• There are no accounts and no sign-in, so nothing you do is tied to an identity.
• Your location is used on your iPhone. Asking for a way there by bus or train sends the start and end coordinates to our service.
• Searching a place uses Apple Maps on your iPhone. We do not see that query.
• The free tier of the app shows ads. Whenbus Pro removes them.
• We use privacy-focused analytics to see which features get used, never to identify a device or a person.
• We do not sell or rent your personal information.
• Arrival times come from LTA DataMall, the Land Transport Authority's official public data service.

Location

If you allow location access, Whenbus uses your position on your device to sort nearby bus stops and to centre the map. Ranking nearby stops and moving the map happens on the phone. Asking for a way there by bus or train is the exception: that request sends the start and end coordinates to our service so it can return a plan. Those two pins are not tied to an identity (there is none), and we do not keep them as a location history.

You can decline location access and still use the app: without it, the map opens at a default position and you pan it to the area you want. You can change the permission at any time in iOS Settings. Ways there needs a start pin, so it asks you to turn location on if you have not.

Searching for a place (a mall, an address, a landmark) uses Apple Maps on your iPhone. Apple receives the search text and a coarse map region so it can suggest nearby places. We do not send that query to our servers, and we do not receive it. Picking a place then asking for a way there sends only the two coordinates (your location, if allowed, and the place) to our service, which reads a public-transport plan from OneMap, a Singapore Land Authority service. We never see the search text.

Bus arrival data

When you open a bus stop, the app asks our service for the arrival times at that stop, which we in turn read from LTA DataMall. That request carries the bus stop code you are looking at. It does not carry your identity, your account (there is none) or your coordinates.

Live updates and notifications

Turning on live updates for a bus starts an iOS Live Activity, which shows that bus's countdown on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. To refresh that countdown while the app is closed, iOS issues a push token for that one activity, and we use it to send updates for that bus at that stop until the activity ends.

The token is tied to a single Live Activity, not to you or your device identity. It stops working when the activity ends, and we discard it then. Notifications are requested at the moment you first follow a bus, not on first launch, and declining them does not affect anything else in the app.

Advertising

The free tier of the Whenbus app shows ads. Whenbus Pro, an auto-renewing subscription, removes them.

Ads are served by a third-party advertising partner rather than by us. To show them, that partner receives technical information from your device: an advertising identifier, IP address, device model, operating system version and coarse region. It may use these to cap how often you see the same ad and to measure whether an ad was displayed. We do not send it your location, the stops you look at, or the buses you follow.

On iOS, an app must ask before using the advertising identifier to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Declining does not remove the ads; it makes them less targeted. You can change that choice at any time in iOS Settings, under Privacy & Security, then Tracking.

Diagnostics

Apple may share aggregate crash and performance diagnostics with us through App Store Connect if you have opted into sharing analytics with app developers in your iOS settings. These reports are aggregated by Apple and do not identify you. We use them only to find and fix defects.

App analytics

Whenbus uses TelemetryDeck, a privacy-focused analytics service, to see which features get used, such as how many people follow a bus or open a stop, so we know what is worth building next. It does not use the advertising identifier, does not read your location or the stops you look at, and does not build a profile of you.

Any device identifier TelemetryDeck's SDK generates is a one-way, salted hash created on your iPhone before anything leaves it, so neither TelemetryDeck nor we can turn it back into your device or your identity. This is the same counts, not people approach as the Cloudflare Web Analytics on this website, applied inside the app.

Purchases

Whenbus is free to use. Whenbus Pro is an optional auto-renewing subscription that removes ads. Subscriptions are processed entirely by Apple under Apple's own privacy policy. We never see your payment details.

Children

Whenbus is a general-audience transport app and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13.

This website

This site is a set of static pages. It has no login, sets no cookies of its own, and loads its fonts from its own domain rather than from a font network. Our web host records ordinary server request logs, which may include IP addresses, for security and reliability.

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views and see which pages people arrive on. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your browser, and does not follow you to other sites, so there is no profile of you to build and nothing to consent to. It is injected by our host rather than bundled into these pages.

There is no advertising on this website. If that changes, this section will say so before it goes live, and anything requiring consent will ask for it.

Your rights

Because we do not hold personal information about you, there is generally no personal data for us to export, correct or erase. If you believe we hold something about you, write to us and we will look and tell you what we find. Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act applies to our handling of any personal data.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and the previous version stops applying from that date.

Contact

Questions about privacy go to [email protected].