NS Marks The Spot

Summary

NS Marks The Spot does not require an account and does not include advertising, analytics, tracking SDKs, or in-app purchases. Location access is optional. When you choose to enable it, both the native app and the browser map can show where you are, mark a point, or save a track locally on the device.

Location

If you grant location permission, the native app uses optional When In Use location to show where you are on the map, to mark a point, and to record a track. It does not ask for Always authorization. An active iOS recording continues while the app is off screen — in a pocket or with the screen locked — and iOS shows its own blue status-bar indicator for as long as that recording session is held. While a track is recording, the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island may show elapsed time and distance (never coordinates) and may offer Pause and Resume; Stop and save stay in the app. Anyone holding the locked phone can see that readout. While an iOS recording is in progress, the app also writes a local checkpoint on the device so that if iOS ends the app, the walk can be offered back at the next launch. That checkpoint stays on the device, is not uploaded, and is not a second tracking channel. It is cleared when you save the walk to a layer or discard it. If you mark a point or save a track recording, those geometries — and for a saved recording, the raw GPX original — are stored locally as your user layers. They are not uploaded by NS Marks The Spot. They leave the device only if you export or share them yourself. The native app does not link location to your identity, sell it, or use it for tracking.

The native app is built with Apple's MapKit. Apple map services and iOS may process map and location requests as part of providing the system map experience.

On the browser map, location is also optional and stays on your device. A live watch can show your position without saving it. A track recording in the browser stays in the foreground: hiding the tab stops it. If you mark a point or save a track recording, those geometries — and for a saved recording, the raw GPX original — are stored locally as your user layers. They are not uploaded by NS Marks The Spot. They leave the device only if you export or share them yourself. Continuous live watching does not send your coordinates to an application server. If you attach a photo that includes a geotag, that location is used only if you accept the optional offer to move the feature to the photo's location. If you pick photos to place on the map, their geotags are read in the browser to create points and are not uploaded.

Map And Tile Requests

On the browser map, the default NS Marks Atlas (Day, Night, or System appearance) draws original NS Marks cartography over a pinned provincial vector-tile archive (PMTiles): Nova Scotia Road Network roads, tracks, rail, and ferries; GeoNAMES labels; NSTDB hydrography and woodland; and municipal boundaries. Production builds load that archive from https://tiles.kinnokilabs.com/provincial-atlas/ with public HTTP range requests and no app credentials. The archive is a dated snapshot, not a claim of live physical conditions. Provincial geography is licensed under the Open Government Licence – Nova Scotia. OpenFreeMap still supplies only supplemental geography (ocean context, non-tree land use, and building footprints) from https://tiles.openfreemap.org/ (planet tiles). Map lettering is drawn from glyph ranges served with the app, so no font host is contacted for labels. Credit for that supplemental context is OpenFreeMap · © OpenMapTiles · © OpenStreetMap contributors; the Atlas is a hybrid, not wholly provincial. An explicit OpenStreetMap raster basemap remains available as a choice and as a fallback if the Atlas source fails. The native app uses Apple MapKit. Its default NS Marks Atlas base map (Day, Night, or Fletcher) is drawn from raster tiles of the same cartography, rendered ahead of time from the same provincial archive and OpenFreeMap context and published at https://tiles.kinnokilabs.com/atlas-raster/ (public HTTP requests, no app credentials), so the phone does not contact OpenFreeMap or the provincial archive directly; Apple's standard, satellite and hybrid maps and the OpenStreetMap raster remain available as choices. Hugh Fletcher historical overlay tiles and Nova Scotia provincial geographic services are also displayed. Those map providers may receive standard network requests for the tiles or layers you view. Searching by PID or civic address sends the search text to the provincial services that answer it. If you turn on parcel snapping while drawing, the native app sends only a licence-gated viewport rectangle to the same provincial parcel service the identify tool already queries. If you turn on the optional live-conditions layers in the browser map, your browser also requests camera imagery from 511 Nova Scotia and radar tiles from Environment and Climate Change Canada's MSC GeoMet. NS Marks The Spot does not operate its own tracking server.

Saved Areas And Cache

Viewed map tiles and prepared Fletcher saved areas are stored on your device to make the map more useful in weak-signal areas. You can clear cached data in the app. This offline data is not uploaded by NS Marks The Spot.

Your Own Maps And Drawings

Maps you import, the placements you give them, the layers you draw, and GPS marks or tracks you save are stored only on your device. NS Marks The Spot does not upload them, and they leave the device only when you export or share something yourself through the iOS share sheet. Features traced from parcel boundaries carry the not-a-survey caveat.

Photos you attach to features on the native app or the browser map are stored only on your device. On the native app, Camera and Photos library access are used when you attach a photo, and Photos library access is also used to index geotagged photos for the on-device photo-library map. Photos are re-encoded so EXIF (including GPS) is stripped from stored and exported bytes. A KMZ export can embed those re-encoded photo bytes; GeoJSON and KML exports do not include photos. Attached photos and their locations leave this device only when you export or share a layer yourself. If a photo includes a geotag, that location is used only if you accept a one-time offer to move the point.

The native app can also show your photo library as a map layer. That index stays on your device and is never uploaded. If you place photos as points on the map, their geotags are read on the device to create those points and are not uploaded.

Bundled Tax-Sale Data

Municipal tax-sale notices ship inside the app as datasets built from public municipal records. They describe properties, not you: the app does not ingest assessed-owner names, and browsing the notices sends nothing about you to the municipalities.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent to dfakkeldy@gmail.com.