Effective October 6, 2026

Privacy Policy

Checked in Korea helps visitors explore places and verify practical travel conditions in Korea. This policy explains the limited personal data used to operate the service.

Data we process

• When you sign in with Google, we receive your Google OpenID issuer and subject identifier and may receive your display name. We do not request the Google email scope.
• We use short-lived, secure cookies to complete sign-in and keep your session active. The login transaction expires after 10 minutes and the normal session expires after about one hour.
• If you choose to save feedback, we store the selected signal, the referenced public-data snapshot, an optional note, the time, and an internal user identifier.
• If you post a spot or event comment, question, answer, field report, tip, or correction, we store that content, its place and time context, any source link you provide, a public pseudonymous alias, and an internal user identifier. The content and alias become public only after administrator approval; pending and rejected content is restricted to the administrator and tools the administrator authorizes for moderation. Your Google identifier is not public.
• If you suggest visit information, we store the place, field, text, language, observation date, linked contribution, public traveller alias and internal account ID. Approved contributions display the alias and date. Pending, rejected and replaced submissions remain available to their author and administrators. Error reports and refresh requests are private, but aggregate pending counts are public. Previous versions and review decisions are retained for attribution and moderation.
• If you submit a traveller photo, we store a resized JPEG, your caption, the selected place, submission time and an internal account identifier. We remove embedded image metadata, including GPS coordinates, before storage. The original file is not stored. Pending photos are visible only to you and the operator; approved photos and captions are public under the label “Traveller”. Photos can still reveal personal information in their visible content.
• Votes and reports are stored with an internal user identifier to prevent duplicate actions, enforce rate limits, and moderate content. Reports are not public. Moderation actions record the reviewer identity, time, decision, and reason. Submission timestamps and normalized content hashes remain linked to an internal user ID for duplicate and rate-limit checks, including after withdrawal.
• A trip draft stays in your browser unless you choose account saving. A saved private plan may include community notes that you explicitly copied, together with the source thread and copy time.
• Our hosting and security providers may process standard request data such as IP address, user agent, timestamps, and security events to deliver and protect the service.

How we use data

We use this data only to authenticate users, prevent abuse, keep evidence linked to the public-data snapshot that a user saw, operate the service, and improve its usefulness. We do not sell personal data or use it for advertising.

Sharing and third parties

Google provides authentication, Cloudflare protects and delivers the site, and our hosting provider runs the application. The Seoul city preview loads map tiles, labels and sprites from OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap data), which receives standard network request information including your IP address and the visible map area. We do not send saved itinerary payloads to this map provider. Enabling Terrain requests elevation tiles from the AWS-hosted Mapzen public dataset; this provider receives your network request information and the requested map area. Optional device location stays in the current tab and is not added to the map-sharing URL. When you calculate a route, our server sends only the two selected public place coordinates and travel mode to Kakao Maps. We do not send your account, saved plan or device location. Route geometry stays in the current page; an explicitly applied duration and its source reference become part of your plan. Daily aggregate request counts are kept to limit usage. The nationwide reference map uses Kakao Maps, and the site may display images or links from named public-data sources. Those providers process requests under their own policies. We disclose data when required by law or necessary to protect the service and its users.

Retention and deletion

Authentication records are retained while the service operates or while needed for security and abuse prevention. User-submitted outcome, vote, and report records are retained as an audit and moderation trail. A withdrawn community post is removed from public view and its text and author link are redacted; the minimal thread record remains so references and moderation history are not silently rewritten. If an account is deleted, the Google identifier and profile link can be removed while audit records remain under an unlinked internal identifier. Temporary sign-in cookies expire automatically.

To request access or deletion, use the developer support contact shown on the Google consent screen and include the user ID shown by your active Checked in Korea session. We will verify the request before changing account data.

You can delete your own pending or approved photos from the place page. Deletion or rejection removes the stored image, caption and ownership record. Upload timestamps and an internal account identifier remain in a short abuse-prevention counter until a later upload clears counters older than one hour. When you sign in to submit a photo, this tab temporarily remembers the place URL and caption for up to 30 minutes; it does not remember the selected image.

Security and changes

We use HTTPS, signed cookies, request limits, restricted scopes, and access controls. No Internet service is completely secure. Material changes to this policy will be posted here with a new effective date.