Nib Atlas

Privacy

Nib Atlas helps you find physical fountain pen shops and keep a private record of the ones you have visited. This page says plainly what that involves.

Nib Atlas does not track where you go

There is no background location, no continuous location history, and no automatic visit detection. Panning the map, opening a shop page, and searching for a place never involve your position at all.

When location is used

For verified collection, location is requested once, in the foreground, after you choose the location check from Collect Stamp while you are at a shop. Your browser asks you first, and you can decline. The position is checked against that shop’s location and then discarded.

Raw coordinates are never stored — not in the database, not in analytics, and not in logs. What is kept is the fact that a verified visit happened, for that shop, on that date.

Declining costs you nothing except that one stamp. Exploration, search, and shop pages continue to work exactly as before.

Browsing and personal actions

The map, search and shop pages are available without an account. Account-backed saving and verified stamp collection require sign-in. These saved shops and stamps are kept privately in Supabase with your account and appear when you sign in on another device. Existing device saves may be imported after sign-in; preview impressions are never imported as visits. In a standalone demonstration without sign-in configured, saves and preview impressions instead stay in this browser and do not require an account.

Verification keeps limited diagnostics for up to 30 days, with automatic deletion normally running every ten minutes. These include the shop, attempt time, outcome, coarse accuracy and distance ranges, and limited abuse indicators. They contain no raw coordinates. Short-lived verification proofs and rate-limit counters are deleted separately.

Beta usage analytics

When configured, PostHog receives anonymous page visits, a few app actions and masked session replays to help us find beta usability problems. Replay hides text and typed input. We do not send email, account identifiers, raw location or authentication tokens. Page visit URLs omit search parameters. PostHog may process browser and network information such as an IP address. Analytics is disabled in builds without a PostHog project token.

Signing in

Signing in is optional. If you choose an email link, Nib Atlas sends your email address to Supabase Auth to manage your account and session, and the configured email delivery service sends the message. If you choose Google, Google and Supabase process the sign-in instead.

Nib Atlas keeps an essential, secure session cookie in your browser so it can recognise that you are signed in. Your email address and account details are not shown publicly. There are still no public profiles.

Your Passport is private

Collected stamps are private by default. There are no public profiles, no followers, no leaderboards, and no feed. Nothing you collect is shown to anyone else.

Nib Atlas also starts you with nothing. A Passport is empty until you put something in it — no sample visits, no places you did not choose.

Your data, your call

Signing out clears the Passport displayed in this browser. Clearing site data does not delete saved shops or stamps held with your account. You can permanently delete your account under Me. This removes your profile, saved shops, Passport stamps, verification working data and your private import and review choices. It cannot be undone.

If you helped maintain the catalogue, catalogue contributions, uploaded media (including unpublished submissions) and limited append-only audit history remain so the catalogue cannot lose its provenance and rights record. They retain only an opaque former-actor identifier after the account and profile are gone. Account export is not available yet. For help, see Help or email hello@nibatlas.com.

When you send us something

Alongside account, save and collection requests, you may choose to send: suggesting a pen shop, and reporting something wrong with a listing from that shop’s own page.

What is sent is what you typed — the shop, and what you know about it. A correction also carries which listing it is about, because you opened it from that listing.

Your name and email address are optional. Give an email only if you are happy to be asked a follow-up question; we ask for a name alongside it so a reply has someone to address. Leave both blank and the submission is anonymous — it is not treated differently.

Submissions are received in a Google spreadsheet the people who maintain the catalogue read, which means Google processes them on our behalf. They are kept while there is still something to do about them and while they are useful as a record of where a listing came from; contact details are cleared once we no longer need them. They are never published, never shown on a shop page, and never used to send you anything you did not ask for.

Each form checks that a person is filling it in, using Cloudflare Turnstile. It is not an advertising or tracking product and it does not follow you around the web.

Device-only previews

Standalone previews may show impressions held on the device. These do not verify your location and are kept separate from your account Passport. Standalone saves also stay on this device when sign-in is unavailable. In those builds, Download local data exports local saved shops and impressions. Clear data on this device removes those same two things from this browser; clearing them does not delete account data. These controls are under Me › On this device.

More about the catalogue and the countries it covers: About Nib Atlas.