Cookies and privacy
In short: no account, no ads, no advertising cookies. Two optional uses, only with your consent: a cookie that counts your free requests, and Google Analytics audience measurement.
Cookies and local storage
| Name | What it is for | Duration | Consent |
|---|---|---|---|
cw_consentcookie | Remembers your choices (accept or reject, for each use) so that you are not asked again on every visit. | 6 months | Not required: it records your choice |
cw_vidcookie | A random identifier that counts your requests (5 per 24-hour period). It contains no information about you and is never shared. | 7 days | Only if you accept |
_ga, _ga_XBTW1BFJYGGoogle Analytics cookies | Audience measurement: they tell browsers apart to count visits and page views, as overall statistics. Google signals and ad personalisation are turned off. | 13 months | Only if you accept audience measurement |
openui-theme-modelocal storage | Remembers the light or dark theme, only if you change it yourself. | Until deleted | Not required: display preference |
If you refuse the cw_vid cookie, the service works the same way: the limit of 5 requests is then calculated from your IP address. If you refuse audience measurement, Google Analytics is not loaded at all; if you withdraw your consent, its cookies are deleted. You can change your mind at any time.
Data we process
- Your messages are sent to our server and then to Claude (Anthropic) to put the route together. CityWalking does not store them: the conversation stays in your browser and disappears when you reload the page. Anthropic processes them under its privacy policy. Do not write sensitive personal information in them.
- Your IP address (and the
cw_vididentifier if you accepted it) is used to limit free use. We only store an irreversible fingerprint (a salted hash), never the address itself, in our database hosted by Railway; these fingerprints are deleted automatically after about 24 hours. Our hosting providers (Cloudflare, Railway) also see your IP address in their technical logs. - Place lookups (Photon, Wikipedia, OSRM, Open-Meteo) are made by our server: these services see place names and coordinates, not your IP address.
- The map loads its images from OpenStreetMap's servers, which see your IP address (no cookie). Wikimedia photos go through our server, so that no third-party cookie is set.
- Audience measurement, only if you accept it: Google Analytics (Google Ireland Limited) receives the pages viewed, the referring page, the device and browser type and an approximate location. Your IP address is used for this location but is not stored by Google Analytics. These statistics are kept for at most 14 months and are not used for advertising. See Google's privacy policy.
- Links to Google Maps, Wikipedia or other sites only open if you click them; those sites then apply their own rules.
Legal bases: legitimate interest (running the service and preventing abuse) and your consent for the cw_vid cookie and for audience measurement. Some providers (Anthropic, Railway, Cloudflare, Google) may process data outside the European Union; for Google, these transfers to the United States rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
Your rights
You can ask to access, correct or erase your data, or object to its processing, by writing to [email protected]. You can also lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority.
Last updated: 16 October 2026