Privacy

Last updated 19 October 2026

Twinhoods has no accounts, no ads, no cookies and no third-party trackers. You can use the whole map without telling us anything. This page explains the little we do handle, and what you can ask us to do with it.

• Who we are
• Using the map
• Visit counts
• Add my city
• Coffee
• Posters
• Emails
• Who else sees it
• Your rights

Who we are

Twinhoods is run by Space Island Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. We decide how the data described here is used, which makes us the “controller” under UK and EU data protection law (the UK GDPR, the EU GDPR) and Turkey’s KVKK. Write to us any time at hello@twinhoods.com.

Using the map

• Map tiles. The base map is loaded from OpenFreeMap. Like any server your browser fetches from, it receives your IP address and which parts of the map you load. We don’t control or receive that.
• Everything else, including the city data and our fonts, comes from our own site. No Google Fonts, no ad networks, no social media widgets.
• Your starting city. We guess the city you know from your device’s time zone. When the time zone covers more than one city on the map (all of India, for example), the page asks our server where your connection comes from; Cloudflare, our host, estimates the city and rough coordinates from your IP address, and the page picks the nearest city on the map. The answer goes only to your browser: we don’t store or log it, or your IP address.
• “Near me”. Only if you press it, your browser asks whether to share your location. The coordinates are used on your device to pick the nearest city and are never sent to us or anyone else.
• What your browser keeps. Your browser’s local storage remembers your theme (light or dark), whether sound is on, the pledges you made on that device, so you can follow and cancel them, and the email address you last paid a pledge with, so the next payment page is filled in for you. This never leaves your device on its own; we can’t read it. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes it. Nothing is stored in your browser for the visit counts below. None of this is a cookie, none of it identifies you, and none of it is shared, so we don’t show a cookie banner.

Visit counts

To know which cities people look at and whether the site works, our server counts visits in aggregate. When a page loads or you use certain features, your browser sends us:

• which kind of page it is (the globe, a pair of cities, a place, or one of these pages) and the two cities on screen;
• what you did, from a short list: share, surprise me, real names, near me, opening Add my city or the coffee page, and the steps of a pledge (started, paid, moved, cancelled);
• on the first page of a visit only (the first page you open coming from another site, a link or a typed address, not a reload or a link within the site): the website that sent you here (only its domain) or the campaign name in the link, your browser’s language (two letters, like “en”), whether you’re on a phone, tablet or computer (worked out from your browser’s user agent, which isn’t kept), and your country, which our host works out from your connection.

These are added to daily totals (for example “34 visits from Germany looking at Lisbon”). We don’t store your IP address, don’t set cookies or any identifier, and don’t keep a row per person or per visit, so the totals can’t be traced back to you. To stop abuse, Cloudflare’s rate limiter counts how many requests each IP address makes to our server per minute; the address is only the counter’s key and is never stored by us. Totals are deleted after 400 days.

Errors. If something breaks on the page, your browser sends us the error message (shortened), the file and line in our code where it happened and the page’s path, without any query string. We don’t store your IP address or anything else about you with it; the reports sit in our host’s logs for at most 7 days, so we can fix the bug.

Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and keeping it running, which we think is balanced by how little is collected.

Add my city

When you back a city, you pay on a payment page run by Stripe. Your card or bank details go straight to Stripe and never reach us. Stripe asks for your email address and passes it to us with the payment. In most countries Stripe sells the pledge as the merchant of record (“Sold through Link”): it then also uses your details for tax, receipts and payment support as a controller in its own right, under Link’s privacy policy.

For each pledge we keep:

• the city, the amount and currency you paid, and what it was worth in US dollars that day;
• your email address, to send you a receipt, tell you when your city wins and is on the map, and about refunds, and (unless you turn them off with the link in every email) short race updates;
• the name you chose to show, if you gave one. It is public: if your pledge starts a city’s run, the name appears next to that city in the race until that run is over;
• Stripe’s reference numbers for the checkout, the payment and any refund (not your card number);
• when the pledge was made, paid, and ended (won, refunded or cancelled);
• a random pledge number, which your browser also keeps so you can cancel, and a random key for the link in our emails that lists your pledges.

We send these emails through Amazon SES (Amazon Web Services), from twinhoods@spaceisland.ltd.

Before a pledge goes through, Cloudflare Turnstile checks in your browser that you’re a person and not a bot. For that check Cloudflare sees your IP address and some signals from your browser; we only learn whether it passed. To stop one connection from using up the day’s pledges, we count pledges per IP address per day under a scrambled code, as for poster orders (below); your IP address itself is never stored.

We use this to run the race, add the winning cities, email you about your pledge, refund you and answer questions. The legal basis is the contract you make by pledging (see the terms), our legitimate interest for the race updates (which you can turn off), and our legal duty to keep financial records.

How long we keep it.

• A pledge that was never paid is deleted after 24 hours.
• Your name is deleted within an hour of your pledge ending. As a city’s starter it goes within an hour of that city’s run ending: when the city is on the map, or when it has no live pledges left.
• Your email address is deleted 12 months after your pledge ended. For a refunded or cancelled pledge we then also delete the Stripe references, keeping only the city, amount and dates as anonymous totals. The record of which emails we sent you goes after 90 days.
• A paid pledge’s payment records are kept for 6 years after the end of the financial year, as UK tax and company law requires (most of them by Stripe).

Stripe keeps its own records of payments under its privacy policy, partly as a controller in its own right (for example for fraud prevention and its legal duties).

Buying us a coffee

The coffee page sends you to a Stripe payment page. Stripe handles your card and email; we see the amount, the date, your email address and the name on the payment in our Stripe account, and use them only to keep accounts and to answer you, for example about a refund. We keep these records for 6 years after the end of the financial year, as tax law requires.

Ordering a printed poster

Downloading a poster happens in your browser; nothing is sent to us. When you order a print, your browser uploads the poster file to us and Stripe’s checkout asks for your name, email, phone number and delivery address. We keep the order: the two cities, size, style, price, the print file, your email and country, and the Stripe and Gelato order references.

To print and deliver it, we pass your name, delivery address, email and phone number to Gelato, our print partner, and its local printer and courier. We send order and tracking emails through Amazon SES. For delivery to Brazil, Stripe also collects your CPF, which we pass to Gelato for customs and delivery. The legal basis is the contract you make by ordering.

Before an order goes to Stripe, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you’re a person, as for pledges. To stop one connection from using up the day’s orders, we count orders per IP address per day under a scrambled code (a hash with a random key that changes daily); the code, the count and that day’s key are deleted the next day, and your IP address itself is never stored.

Print files for orders that are never paid are deleted after 2 days, and those of paid orders, with your email address, 90 days after the order. Paid orders are kept for 6 years after the end of the financial year, as tax law requires.

Emails

If you write to us, we keep your message and address to answer it and to follow up on the same matter. We delete correspondence after 2 years unless it relates to a payment, which we keep with that payment’s records.

Who else sees it

We don’t sell your data or share it for advertising. These companies process data for us:

New cities are researched and written with AI (Anthropic’s Claude) and published through GitHub. They only ever receive a city’s name and public map data, never anything about you or other visitors.

Cloudflare, Stripe and Amazon Web Services are US companies and Gelato prints and ships worldwide, so data may be processed outside the UK, EU and Turkey. Where they do, they rely on the legal safeguards for international transfers: the UK and EU adequacy decisions for the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, or standard contractual clauses. We may also share data if the law requires it.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you and give you a copy;
• correct it, or delete it (unless we must keep it by law, for example a charged payment);
• stop or limit using it, or object to uses based on our legitimate interest;
• send it to you or another company in a common format.

Email hello@twinhoods.com. For a pledge, write from the email address you paid with, or tell us the city, the amount and roughly when. We answer within a month and don’t charge for it.

If you’re unhappy with how we handled your data, please tell us first. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk), to the data protection authority where you live in the EU, or in Turkey to the Personal Data Protection Authority (kvkk.gov.tr).

If you’re in Turkey

Under KVKK (Law No. 6698), Space Island Ltd is the data controller (veri sorumlusu). We process the data above for the purposes and on the grounds explained on this page: performing the contract you make by pledging or paying, our legal duties, and our legitimate interest in running the site. You have the rights in Article 11 of KVKK, including to learn whether we process your data, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object; send requests to the address above. Some of the companies above are abroad, so data is transferred outside Turkey for these purposes.

Children

The map is for everyone, but pledging and payments are for adults with their own card. We don’t knowingly collect data from children.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we’ll update this page and the date at the top before it takes effect.