Questions and answers

A personal record of how often you go into the office, measured against the attendance policy you were given. You tell it where your office is and what your policy asks for. It tells you where you stand — how many days you have been in, how many the period still needs, and whether today is a day you should go.

It answers one question, for one person: am I meeting my own policy?

The individual employee, and nobody else. You install it, you configure it, you are the only person who sees it. It is bought — eventually — by you, not by your company.

No. There is no employer dashboard, no manager view, no admin console, and no way for an organisation to be given access to your account. There is no plan to build one, and there will not be one.

This is a product commitment, not a privacy setting you have to find and switch on. It is stated the same way in the privacy policy, which is the document that binds.

The reason is simple. The moment an employer can see this data, every design decision after that point gets made for the employer instead of you — and the product becomes the opposite of what it is for. Ruling it out permanently is cheaper than defending it feature by feature.

You place one or more office areas on a map — a point and a radius. The iOS app asks your phone to notify it when you cross the edge of one. Stay inside for a few minutes and a visit opens; leave and it closes. That gives an arrival time, a departure time, and a day marked as attended.

The dwell requirement exists so driving past your own office does not count as a day at work.

No. The web app works on its own — you mark the days you went in, and everything else (your policy, your history, where you stand) works identically. The phone app exists to remove the marking, not to enable the product.

Fix it. Every day is editable: log a visit, delete one, correct its times, or mark the day as PTO, working from home, or a holiday. Nothing the automatic detection produces is locked.

Automatic detection will miss days. A phone left at home, location permission quietly downgraded by iOS, a geofence crossing the operating system chose not to deliver — all of these happen, and none of them are things an app can prevent. That is exactly why manual correction is a first-class feature and not a fallback.

Your policy decides, not us. You set which weekdays are working days, whether the target is counted in days or in hours, what that target is (a percentage, or a flat number), how long a period runs, and whether a minimum duration is required before a day counts at all. Days you mark as PTO, a holiday or an agreed day away are removed from what was expected of you, rather than counted as failures — whatever reason you attach to them.

Going in on a weekend is credited if your policy says so, but never adds a requirement. Turning up on a Saturday should be upside, never a new obligation.

Yes, as many as you need, and they all count equally. There is no main office and no secondary one — a day at either is a day.

It is not designed for that, and you should not rely on it for it. This is a personal record kept on your own say-so: you can add, edit and delete any day in it. That is the right design for a tool that answers to you, and it is precisely what makes it unsuitable as evidence to anyone else.

You can export everything as a file if you want to keep or share it. What you do with your own record is yours to decide — but it carries the authority of a personal note, not of a badge system.

Because the entire promise is that you do not have to do anything on arrival. A location permission that only works while the app is open would mean opening the app every time you get to work — which is the check-in the product exists to remove.

Your phone wakes the app when you cross the edge of an area you placed yourself. Between those crossings it is not watching you and not running.

No trail of your location is stored — not for a day, not for an hour.

When your phone reports a position, the server compares it to your own office areas, decides whether that means you have arrived or left, and writes down only that: an arrival time and, later, a departure time. The coordinates are discarded in the same request. They are never written to the database and never logged.

The only coordinates stored anywhere are the office areas you placed yourself. WhereWise cannot show you where you were last Tuesday afternoon, because it does not know.

A latitude, a longitude and an accuracy figure, when a crossing happens — used once, then dropped. Separately, the app reports whether it still has background location permission and how many areas it is watching, so the site can warn you when automatic tracking has quietly stopped. That report contains no location.

No, to all three. There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no behavioural profiling and no third-party marketing scripts anywhere in the product. Your data is not sold, rented, or shared for anyone else’s commercial purposes.

The one thing that does leave is crash reports from the phone app, so failures can be found and fixed. They are not linked to your account, carry no location, and are not used to build any picture of how you use the app.

There is no business model here that involves your data reaching anyone. The business model is that you pay for the app.

All of them, named: Vercel hosts the site, Neon hosts the database (both in the United States), Resend delivers password reset and address confirmation emails, OpenStreetMap serves the map tiles when you place an area, and Sentry receives crash reports from the phone app, configured to strip IP addresses and drop any diagnostic data containing coordinates. If you sign in with Apple, Apple handles that sign-in and tells us only what you allowed it to — which may be a relay address rather than your real one, and works exactly the same either way.

Typefaces are served from our own domain rather than a font CDN, so viewing a page does not disclose your address to a third party. The full list, and what each one receives, is in the privacy policy.

Yes. You can allow an app — the kind of AI assistant you might already use — to read your attendance and answer questions about it, so “how many days am I behind this quarter?” can be asked where you already are instead of here.

What it can do. Read your visits, your policies, how the current period stands, and your office areas by name — coordinates are never sent. It can also mark a future day as planned in or out, which is the one thing it can write.

What it can never do. Create, edit or delete a visit. Not “is not allowed to” — there is no permission that does it, so there is nothing to misuse. Your attendance record is only ever changed by you.

This is you reaching your own data, not us sharing it. Nothing leaves WhereWise unless you approve a specific app, and what that app then does with what it reads is governed by that company, not by this page. Each approval is listed under Settings → Connected apps, with what it can do and when it last used the access, beside a button that ends it — because an approval you cannot see afterwards is not really consent.

The key an app holds expires every hour and is replaced while the approval stands. Disconnect, and it stops working on that app’s next request; an approval that goes thirty days unused lapses on its own.

Yes, yourself, immediately, on the web at Settings → Your data → Export my data. It is a JSON file containing your account details, office areas, policies, attendance records and marked days — the actual records, not a summary, so you could rebuild your history from it.

The export lives on the web rather than in the phone app, because what you get is a file to keep somewhere, and a phone is the worst place to put one.

In the phone app: the gear → Delete account. On the web: Settings → Your data → Delete my account. Either asks for your password and then removes your account and every record belonging to it.

It is immediate and it cannot be undone. There is no backup to restore from, which is the honest consequence of not keeping copies of your history. Export first if you might want it.

On iOS, if you ask it to. WhereWise can tell you when a visit starts and when it ends, how long you were there, and when you collect something. Nothing is on until you turn it on: iOS asks once, and the app only asks when you tap the switch in Settings → On this phone.

There is one more, and it exists to catch a mistake rather than to nag: if a visit is still open after nine hours, the phone asks whether you have left, so the day is recorded with the right times instead of being truncated later. You can turn each of these off separately.

These are scheduled on the device. There is no push server and no notification token — nothing about where you are leaves your phone to make one arrive.

The mail the service cannot work without — a password reset link when you ask for one, and a confirmation when you sign up — and a progress summary on whatever schedule you choose.

The summary says where you stand against your policy, lists anything you earned, and lists the dates you were in the office. It comes monthly unless you change it; Settings → Email summaries offers daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or never, and every summary links straight to that setting.

The dates are the point of listing them: a folder of those emails is a copy of your attendance record living somewhere WhereWise does not control. If the account is lost, or one day the service is not here, the days are still yours.

No marketing, no newsletter, no announcements, and nothing sent on anyone else’s behalf.

Automatic detection stops and nothing else changes. Your history, your policy and every number stay exactly as they were, and you can keep logging days by hand. The app will tell you tracking has stopped rather than silently recording nothing — silence is the failure mode that costs someone a month of history.

Not yet. WhereWise is open to a small, fixed number of accounts at a time. The limit is there because everything is free right now and every account is a real cost, and because a service that grows faster than the person running it can answer email is a worse service.

When every place is taken, the sign-up page becomes a waitlist: leave an address and you’ll be emailed when one opens. That address is used for that and nothing else — no newsletter, no product mail — and asking to be taken off removes it.

Nothing at the moment. WhereWise is free for everyone right now — every feature, no card, no trial timer. The pricing page describes what it will cost when that changes.

No. There will be a trial with everything in it, and then one plan with everything in it — not a reduced edition alongside a real one. A version with the automatic part removed would not answer the only question worth asking, which is whether you stop having to keep count.

What is free permanently is leaving. Your whole record exports in a format you can read, you can delete the account yourself, and nothing is held back to make going harder.

Through Apple’s in-app purchase system, handled by Apple. WhereWise never sees or stores a card number.

It is not deleted and it is not held hostage. Automatic detection stops; your history stays yours, remains readable, and remains exportable.

The web app works in any modern browser, and the iOS app is on the App Store — iPhone, iOS 16.4 or later. The app is the one that makes tracking automatic; the web app is where you set the policy up and go digging through the history.

Start on whichever suits you. The app can create your account — it asks three questions about your policy first, so it has something true to tell you the moment it opens — and so can the web. It is the same account either way.

There is no Android app yet. It is planned, and there is no date; we would rather say that than let you infer one from silence. There is no iPad app. In the meantime the web app works in any mobile browser.

It uses the operating system’s own geofencing, which is the low-power path: the system already knows roughly where the phone is and wakes the app only when a boundary you defined is crossed. The app does not poll your location on a timer and does not run continuously in the background.

Mostly, and not perfectly — and we would rather say so here than have you find out in month three. Delivering a geofence crossing is the operating system’s decision, not the app’s. iOS may delay a crossing, deliver it out of order, or not deliver it at all, particularly when a phone is low on battery or has been denied background permission.

So the app watches for its own silence and tells you when tracking looks like it has stopped, and every day remains editable by hand. A tracker that quietly undercounts is worse than no tracker, because you would act on the number.

No, and the distinction is the whole product. Monitoring software is installed by an organisation to observe people for that organisation. WhereWise is installed by a person to answer a question about themselves, and the organisation cannot see it, cannot buy it on your behalf, and cannot be granted access to it.

The reason it exists is that people are being measured against attendance policies whose numbers they cannot see. Being able to check your own compliance is the counterweight to that, not an extension of it.

They could ask you to install anything, and no app can prevent that. What WhereWise makes sure of is that there is nothing for them to be given: no organisation account, no shared view, no admin access, no bulk export, no API for an employer to pull from. The only route to your data is your own login, and the only export is the one you run yourself.

If you are being asked to prove attendance, a tool you can edit freely is not the proof anyone should be relying on. See can I use it to prove attendance.

WhereWise is operated by Preston Dale Ferguson as an individual, not a company. Data questions, deletion requests and security reports go to admin@wherewise.app, and are answered by a person.

You would be told before it happened, with time to export. That is why the export is a button you can press yourself rather than a request you have to send — a right that depends on someone answering an email is not much of a right.

Passwords are hashed and salted with a memory-hard algorithm and are never stored in a form anyone can read. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign-in and password reset endpoints are rate limited against guessing. Session tokens are random, expire on their own, are stored only as hashes, and are revoked when you sign out. Password reset links are single-use, short-lived, and stored only as hashes.

Every query is scoped to your account, and that is covered by tests which deliberately attempt to read, edit and delete another account’s records and assert that all three are refused.

Exact parameters and thresholds are deliberately not published here — they help someone tuning around them and nobody else.

You would be told, promptly and specifically: what was taken, what it means for you, and what to do. No system is perfectly secure and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

Worth knowing about the blast radius: the database contains your email address, a hash of your password, the office areas you placed, and timestamps of arrivals and departures. It does not contain a location history, a card number, or anything about where you were between those places — because none of that is ever stored.

Email admin@wherewise.app rather than disclosing it publicly. It will be taken seriously and you will get a reply from a human.

WhereWise is a workplace tool and is not intended for anyone under 16. Accounts are not knowingly created for children, and any found are deleted.

Every signed-in page has a Feedback button in the bottom corner, and the app has one on the Profile tab. Both go straight to the person who builds WhereWise, and both send your email address, your plan, and whether you have a policy and office areas set up — enough to reproduce most problems without a second round of questions. No attendance or location data is attached, and nothing you write is stored in the app.

The app asks for feedback on its own at most twice a year, and only after something has gone right. Saying “not now” costs the same six months of silence as answering.

Email admin@wherewise.app. If it is a question other people would also ask, it gets added to this page.