Privacy Policy

If you allow it, BusLine uses your location while you're using the app or website to find nearby stops, buses and disruptions, and to plan journeys from where you are. BusLine doesn't use your location in the background and doesn't keep a history of where you've been.

To answer these requests, an approximate area around you is sent to bustimes.org and to our own server at buslineuk.com. It isn't linked to you and isn't stored beyond normal server logs.

When you look up a stop or track a bus, BusLine sends the stop, line and trip you're viewing to bustimes.org to get live times. To show road names, stop and bus positions are looked up with Apple Maps (iPhone) or OpenStreetMap (website). None of these requests include who you are.

When you ask Ask BusLine something, the words you typed or said, the last few messages of that chat (so follow-up questions make sense) and an approximate location are sent to our server at buslineuk.com. They're answered by an open-source AI model running on that server. Your questions are never sent to OpenAI, Google or any other AI company, and they're never used to train an AI model.

Our server doesn't store your questions or its answers. They're used to work out the answer and then thrown away, and they aren't written to our logs.

Your chats are saved on your iPhone only, in the app's private storage, and are left out of iCloud backups. BusLine keeps your last 100 chats. You can delete one chat or all of them from the chat history in Ask BusLine, or delete the app to remove them all.

When Ask BusLine looks something up for you, it writes a short search from your question and sends it through our own search service to public search engines. The search engines see our server, not you, and the search doesn't include your location or who you are.

When you tap the microphone or Speak, your iPhone turns your speech into text using Apple's speech recognition. This happens on your iPhone where possible, and otherwise on Apple's servers under Apple's privacy policy. BusLine only receives the text, never the recording.

BusLine's voices read out announcements, such as “Next stop, Wallace Street”, and Ask BusLine's answers. That text is sent to our server, which makes the audio with our own open-source voice. If our voice is unavailable, and for the security warning voice, the text may be sent to OpenAI's text-to-speech service instead. Only the wording is sent, never your location or any personal details. Common phrases are cached so the same words aren't sent again.

Like most websites, our server keeps short-lived technical logs, including your IP address, the page or address requested and the time, to keep BusLine secure and working. We don't use them to identify you, and they're deleted regularly.

Your favourite stops, recent and saved trips, Ask BusLine chats, and settings such as your chosen voice are stored on your device only. Clear past trips from Settings and chats from Ask BusLine's history in the iPhone app, or delete the app to remove everything. On the website, clearing your browser's site data does the same.

Stop alerts and Lock Screen updates are created on your iPhone. BusLine doesn't use push notification tokens or send you marketing messages.

BusLine is suitable for everyone and doesn't knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Under UK data protection law you can ask what information we hold about you and ask us to delete it. Because BusLine has no accounts, we normally hold nothing that identifies you, but email us and we'll help. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top, and the iPhone app will show you what's changed.