What a check-in stores
When you check in a lighter, the journey keeps only what you volunteer:
- A city, town or village, chosen from a list of known places — never a typed location
- Whether that city was chosen by name or found by your device
- An optional nickname, up to 24 characters
- An optional note, up to 60 characters
- An optional photograph
If you use where you are
Your device’s location is asked for only when you press “Use where I am”, and only once per press. Your browser asks your permission first, and you can refuse and choose the city by name instead.
- Your device works out its position and keeps it. The position is never sent to us.
- Your device sends only the quarter-degree square it is in—roughly 28 by 19 kilometres in central Europe—and receives the places in and around that square. If none of them is close, it asks once more for the one-degree square around it, roughly 110 by 75 kilometres.
- Your device picks the nearest of those places itself, and you confirm it before anything is saved.
- What is saved is the place, and the fact that your device found it. The square is not saved, though like any request it may appear in our host’s request logs for as long as those are kept.
A stop found this way is marked “Located by device” on the public page. That says how the city was chosen; it is not a guarantee of where the lighter was.
Nothing sent carries a precise coordinate—not from you, and not from the city reference.
Cities are stored at city-centre precision: one-thousandth of a degree (about 110 metres). A database constraint prevents anything finer from being stored, and existing coordinates cannot be replaced with precise data.
What happens to photographs
A photo you attach is processed on receipt:
- Decoded and validated (JPEG, PNG, or WebP formats only)
- Rotated to match its embedded orientation
- Resized to fit 1600×1600 pixels
- Re-encoded as WebP
- All metadata removed, including GPS and camera info (using the sharp library)
The processed image is held in a private, non-public storage bucket. It does not appear on the lighter’s public page until an owner approves it.
What the public page shows
A lighter’s public diary shows:
- Published stops: city, date, and approved photos and notes
- Contributor nicknames (when supplied)
- A count only of pending check-ins (never their city, contributor, or note)
What a moderation decision does
An owner who reviews a check-in can approve or decline it:
- Publish: the note and photo both appear on the public page
- Text-only: the note appears, but the photo is removed and not published
- Reject: both the photo and note are deleted; an audit record remains so ownership has a trail
In every case the original upload is deleted after the decision.
Rate limiting
So that one contributor cannot stamp a lighter repeatedly in a day, check-ins are counted against a daily fingerprint: a secret-salted hash of the date and the caller’s IP address.
The address itself is never stored, and the hash is different every day, so it identifies nobody from one day to the next.
Cookies
The public site sets no cookies and needs no account.
The owner console sets session cookies once an owner signs in, and uses them for nothing but that session.
Who is responsible
Awowen is responsible for the data described on this page.
Requesting data removal
To remove a check-in, a photo, a note, or a whole journey, email info@briquet-voyageur.com
Technical details
- Next.js for the web server and API routes
- Supabase for database, authentication, and file storage
- PostgreSQL for persistent data