keeping wanderers safe

Who Whimsee is for

The open wander app is for grown-ups, 18 and over. Children come to Whimsee only in two gentle, supervised ways:

• With a family. A parent or guardian creates and looks after a child profile, a nature name and an emoji, with no email and no real name. The parent chooses what their child can see, family-safe by default, and okays anything their child wants to make public before anyone else can find it.
• At school. A teacher runs a closed trail. Children hold no accounts and we store no personal data about them. During a session they see only the trail the teacher made, never anything left by strangers.

A child never gets an account of their own unless a parent chooses to make one. There is no way for a child to sign themselves up.

What keeps children safe here

• No private messaging, anywhere. There is no chat in Whimsee at all, so no one can privately contact a child.
• Location is always a fuzzed warm-zone. An approximate area, never an exact position, never stored, and never shown to other people as a point on a map. There is a clear indicator whenever location is in use.
• Grown-ups are in control. In family mode a parent sets what their child sees and approves anything they share. Content is family-safe by default.
• We ask for as little as possible. We never profile children, never use streaks or other nudges designed to keep them hooked, and we never sell anyone's data.

Caring for wild places

Some places are fragile. Whimsee only ever shows a fuzzed warm-zone, never an exact pin, so a sensitive spot is never handed out as a precise location. Keepers can remove anything that would expose a place that ought to be left in peace.

If something feels wrong

Every glimmer and note can be flagged in the app with a tap. A keeper looks at what is flagged and can gently remove it. You can also write to us directly at hello@whimsee.co.uk, and a school or parent can raise a concern with us the same way. We take every report seriously.

Our safeguarding lead is Chelsea Hopkins. A parent, a school, or anyone with a worry can email her directly at hello@whimsee.co.uk to talk it through. If we ever encounter content that is illegal, we act on it and report it to the proper authorities.

How this fits together

This sits alongside our privacy notice, which explains what little data we hold and how we look after it. Both are written to the UK's standards for services children might use, including the ICO's Children's Code. This is our policy while we finish our formal setup.