Privacy policy

Effective October 6, 2026

LoreTour is a public map of Manhattan’s buildings and the history behind them, run by Noah Lee. Anyone can read it without an account. This page explains what LoreTour collects when you sign in, post or ask the guide, and who else sees it.

If you only read

You don’t need an account to browse the map or read any entry, and LoreTour doesn’t ask you for anything. Your browser does talk to the services listed under Services the site uses, which receive your IP address the way any website does.

Your account

To ask the guide, write a timeline, post or upvote comments, or save buildings, you sign in with Google, using a Gmail account. Google tells us your Gmail address and the name on your Google account; we never see your Google password. We keep:

• Your email address, to know it’s you and to contact you about your account if needed. It isn’t shown to other people.
• Your display name, if you give one. It appears next to what you post.
• Your profile picture, if you add one: a small square copy of the picture you choose. It appears next to your name and comments, so anyone can see it.
• Your four favorite buildings, if you pick them. They appear on your profile, which anyone can open from your name on a comment.
• The timelines you generate: which buildings, how many entries and when. Only you see this list; the timelines themselves are public.

What you post

Lore entries, comments and building names you add are public: anyone can read them, along with your display name. Saved buildings and upvotes are kept with your account; others see only how many upvotes a comment has. You can remove your own lore and comments at any time.

The guide

When you ask the guide a question, your question and the recent conversation are sent to the AI service that writes the answer, currently OpenRouter, which runs Anthropic’s Claude model through Anthropic and major cloud providers, with data collection turned off. LoreTour doesn’t store your questions or the answers, with one exception: when someone taps one of the example prompts on the Guide tab, its answer is kept until the end of the day, not linked to anyone, so the next person who taps it gets it right away. To keep the guide fair, it counts how many questions each account asks per day, recorded under a scrambled (hashed) form of your account ID rather than your email.

Analytics and logs

LoreTour uses Vercel Web Analytics to count visits, which pages are viewed and which sites send visitors. It sets no cookies. Our hosting and database providers keep standard server logs (such as IP addresses and the time of each request) for security and troubleshooting.

Stored in your browser

LoreTour saves a few preferences in your browser’s local storage: light or dark mode, your map layer and imagery choices, the last panel you had open, and a draft of an entry you’re writing. When you sign in, your session is stored there too. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Services the site uses

• Supabase: the database, sign-in and sign-in emails.
• Vercel: hosting and analytics.
• OpenRouter: answers to guide questions, as described above, and timelines written on request (it searches the web for the building; only the building is sent, nothing about you).
• Google: signing in, the site’s fonts, and the 3D, satellite and Street View images.
• New York State: aerial photographs of the city.
• NYC Municipal Archives (through 1940s.nyc and 80s.nyc), OldNYC and Wikimedia Commons: photographs of buildings and monuments, which load from their sites when a page shows them.
• Urban Archive and Wikipedia: images and articles you open from a building.
• jsDelivr and cdnjs: code libraries the pages load.

Each of these handles what it receives under its own privacy policy.

What we don’t do

LoreTour has no ads. We don’t sell your information or share it with advertisers.

Your choices

To delete your account, or to get a copy of what your account holds, email noahlee519@gmail.com from the address you sign in with. Deleting your account removes your email and display name. We may keep the lore and notes you posted on the map without your name unless you ask us to remove them too.

Children

LoreTour isn’t meant for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has signed up, email us and we’ll delete the account.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about privacy: noahlee519@gmail.com.