Effective 13 September 2026
Have I Been Here? answers one question: have I been near this spot before? It compares where you are standing with the places your own photographs were taken, and shows you the earlier visits. This page says what the app reads, what it keeps, what it sends, and how you remove it.
The app is published by Christian Neuhaus. Questions about this policy go to info@44-2.de.
The short version
- Your photographs stay on your phone. The app never uploads them anywhere.
- Your current location is used only while the app is open, is never stored, and is never sent to anyone.
- There is no account, no server of ours, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking.
- The only connections the app makes are to photo libraries you connect yourself, using the address and key you enter.
- Everything the app keeps is deleted when you uninstall it, and most of it can be removed from inside the app before that.
What the app reads
Photographs on your phone
With your permission the app reads the photographs on your phone, by default only those in the camera folder. It reads each photograph’s date and, from the image file’s own metadata, the place it was taken. Android asks for this as two permissions: access to your photos, and access to the location information stored inside them. Without the second, every photograph would appear to have no place and the app could not answer anything.
Photographs are opened read-only. The app never edits, moves, renames or deletes a photograph, on your phone or in any library you connect. Photographs taken today or yesterday are deliberately left out of answers, so the app never shows you the trip you are on as a memory.
Your current location
When you ask about a place, the app compares your position with the places in your photographs. It starts listening for your position when its main screen opens, so that the answer is ready when you press the button, and it stops when you leave the app. The app asks for location while using the app only. It does not request background location and has no use for it.
Your position is held in memory only for as long as it is needed to answer. It is not written to storage, and it is not sent to any server. The matching runs entirely on the phone against the dates and places already there. If you turn on Show location details in the app’s advanced settings, the position an answer was given from is printed on that screen for you to see, and nowhere else.
Photo libraries you connect
Optionally you can connect a photo library you run yourself, currently an Immich server or a Free Your Photos archive. To do so you enter its address and an access key, and, if the library sits behind Cloudflare Access, that service’s client id and secret. From a connected library the app reads the same things it reads from your phone: for each photograph its date, place, size, a checksum and the titles of the albums it belongs to, and on request a single image to display.
What the app keeps on your phone
- A list of dates and places. For every photograph it has seen, the app stores the date and time it was taken, its coordinates and their accuracy, its size in pixels, a checksum, an identifier within its source, and the album titles it belongs to. This is the archive the app answers from. It does not contain the images themselves.
- The credentials of libraries you connect. The address and keys you enter are sealed with a key generated inside the phone’s hardware-backed keystore, which never leaves the device. They cannot be read by other apps and cannot be moved to another phone.
- A cache of the photographs you have looked at. Images fetched from a connected library are kept in the app’s cache directory, up to 256 MB, so that opening the same memory twice does not fetch it twice. Clear cached photos in Settings empties it at any time.
- Bookkeeping. When each library was last checked and how far the check got, so that an interrupted scan can resume.
None of this is included in Android backups or in device-to-device transfer. The app opts out of both. A new phone starts from an empty archive and rebuilds it from the same sources.
What leaves your phone
If you connect no library, the app makes no network connection at all. Nothing is called, nothing reports back.
If you connect a library, the app talks to that library and to nothing else. Each request carries the address you entered, your access key, the Cloudflare Access credentials if you supplied them, and the app’s name as its user agent. Two things about this are worth knowing:
- When you open a photograph from a connected library, that library’s server necessarily learns which photograph was opened. This is inherent to fetching an image on demand instead of copying every image to the phone.
- The library you connect is yours or one you have been given access to. Its operator’s own privacy practices apply to the requests it receives. We are not that operator and see none of that traffic.
The app contains no analytics library, no crash-reporting library, no advertising library, no map service and no geocoding service. Place names shown with a photograph come from the library that holds it, not from any lookup of ours. Google Play may share aggregated crash and performance reports about the app with us under Google’s own terms and privacy policy; those reports contain no photographs and no locations from the app.
Removing your data
- Disconnect a library in Settings, and the app deletes its credentials and every date and place it contributed.
- Clear cached photos in Settings deletes every image the app has fetched.
- Revoke photo or location access in Android’s own settings at any time. The app tells you what it can no longer do and offers the way back.
- Uninstall the app, and Android deletes everything above, including the sealed credentials.
Because nothing is held anywhere but on your phone, there is nothing to request from us and nothing we could delete on your behalf.
Permissions the app asks for
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Photos and videos (read) | To read the date of each photograph on your phone. Videos are not read. |
| Location stored in your media | To read the place a photograph was taken from the image file itself. Android hides this from apps by default. |
| Location, while using the app | To compare where you are standing with your photographs. Never in the background, never stored, never sent. |
| Internet | Only to reach a photo library you have connected. Unused otherwise. |
Children
The app is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone. It is intended for adults who want to remember their own travels.
Changes
If a future version of the app reads, keeps or sends anything not described here, this page will be updated first and the date at the top will change. The version of the app you are running is shown under Settings → About.