The Guide is a reader for Wikipedia, retold in a comic voice, with a few games and curiosities tucked inside. It has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking. This page says exactly what leaves your phone, and why.
Saved entries, the stamps in your passport, game scores and progress, your settings (theme, text size and the rest), any emergency contacts you choose to type in, and the entries the app has already fetched. None of this is sent to me or to anyone else.
To Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikiquote and Wikimedia Commons (the Wikimedia Foundation). When you search, open an entry, look at pictures or use Nearby, the app asks these services for the matching articles, facts, quotations and images. That includes your search words, the titles you open and, for Nearby, your approximate position, used to find articles close to you. The Wikimedia Foundation sees your network address, as any website would, and handles it under its own privacy policy.
To Apple. Points of interest in Nearby come from Apple Maps, which is given the area you are searching. If you search by voice, your speech is turned into text by Apple's speech recognition, which may send the audio to Apple. Both are covered by Apple's privacy policy.
To the Guide's server, and from it to OpenAI. To retell an entry in the Guide's voice, or to read it aloud, the app sends the text of the entry (the Wikipedia article, with any Wikidata facts and Wikiquote lines for the same subject) to a small server I run, which passes it to OpenAI to write or speak it and returns the result. What is sent is the public text of an article, never your name, your position, your saved items or anything else about you. The server sees your network address and a random identifier the app made for this installation. It is not tied to your name or an account, and it is not the hardware identifier Apple supplies; it exists only for abuse prevention and rate limiting, so that no one install can run up the bill. A daily count is kept against it and against the address for about a day, and then forgotten. OpenAI handles the text under its own terms. If you choose “This phone” under “Rewritten by” in Settings, entries are written on your phone by Apple's on-device model, and nothing is sent to OpenAI.
You can refuse any of these and the rest of the app still works.
I do not sell or share personal data, I do not build profiles, I do not track you across apps or websites, and the app contains no third-party advertising or analytics.
Entries are adapted from Wikipedia, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Every entry links back to the original article and its authors. The Guide is not made or endorsed by Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Guide is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
If this policy changes, the date above changes with it. Questions: theguide@samdyatt.com.