Free forever

What is free, forever

• Conditions and the safety verdict for every beach, today and the days ahead.
• Your swim log, with no limit on the number of swims: from your phone, from a watch file, or by hand. With, on every open-water swim whose place is known, that day's sea and weather, where the archives go back that far.
• Alerts for your favourite beaches: the morning summary, as a notification.
• Your contributions (reports, photos, jellyfish) and your species collection.
• Exporting all your data and deleting your account, whenever you want, without asking.
• No advertising. Your data is never sold or passed on to advertisers.

If part of oswim ever becomes paid, it will be something new — an extra service. Nothing written here will be taken back.

What leaves your phone

• Your swimming workouts, and nothing else from Health (iPhone) or Health Connect (Android) — only if you install the app and allow it. For each swim: date and time, duration, distance, lengths and strokes, heart rate, calories; on iPhone also the stroke count, SWOLF, effort, water temperature and the heart rate of the three minutes after. They travel to our servers to build your log, and stay private by default. The app never writes to Health or to Health Connect.
• The GPS route of an open-water swim, when the watch recorded one and you allow it. It stays private: it only appears on a beach's page if you share the swim, without your name, with only the fields you choose.
• For “that day”, our servers ask Open-Meteo, our forecast provider, for the sea and weather at the hour of your swim. They send it the position of the linked beach — or, with no beach, the first point of the route — and the date. Never your name, your email address or your account.
• Your location, if you let oswim know it to show you the beaches around you. It travels to our servers, which look for the nearest beaches. With nothing that identifies you, it also goes to our forecast providers (Open-Meteo, the Copernicus marine service, and MET Norway as a fallback) if you open the conditions at that spot, and to OpenStreetMap — in France, also to the French State's mapping services — if oswim has not looked for beaches in your area for a month. It is stored neither in your account nor with your device; so as not to repeat the same searches, oswim notes which areas have already been explored, with no link to you. When you type a name in the search box, what you write goes to Photon (Komoot), a place-search service built on OpenStreetMap, to complete the list with towns and localities — without your account and without your device. The background of the maps is made of images (tiles) that your phone requests directly from OpenStreetMap's tile servers and, for the satellite view, from Esri's (ArcGIS): they receive your IP address and the area of the map you are looking at — never your account. On the home page, when you have allowed your location, the map shows the beaches around you: the area looked at is then close to your position.
• Your favourites: without an account they stay on your device, and only their list travels with your visits so the page can show them; with an account they are kept on your account. An alert, on the other hand, always lives on our servers, since that is where the summary is sent from: the beach or place you follow, the hour, your time zone and your device's notification address — and your account, if you are signed in. The message reaches you through Apple's, Google's or your browser's notification service.
• Your contributions, tied to an anonymous identifier of your device. A jellyfish report shows on the beach's page, without your name. A map position or a missing beach you suggest only carries your first name if you gave it; an ambassador, for their part, shows their first name and their note on their beach. The photos in your reports are never public: only you and moderation see them.
• Anonymous counters (a beach page opened, a search): no account, no device, no IP address. They are erased after 90 days, like technical error reports. Visits to the site are measured by Cloudflare, which every visit passes through, with no cookie.
• What you entrust to oswim is kept on our own servers, with Hetzner, in Germany, in the European Union.

What never leaves

• Your other health data. The app has no access to your sleep, your weight or your steps, and of your workouts it only sends the swims.
• Your contacts and your microphone: the app has no access to them. Of your photos, it only reads the one you choose to attach to a report.
• Your photos are not analysed by any artificial intelligence: only moderation looks at them.
• Nothing for advertisers: no advertising, and no third-party analytics tool in the apps. On Android, the only Google services built in are there to receive notifications and, if you choose, to sign in with Google; the advertising ID is removed.
• Your swims are stored in no third-party cloud, neither iCloud nor a Google backup: the app does not keep them on your phone, it sends them to our servers.