Privacy
Privacy notice
transIST is an open-source demo that answers questions about Istanbul public transport. There is no account, no identity check, and no advertising or analytics tracker. What follows is the full list of what is processed.
Last updated: 25 July 2026
What is processed
- The message you type: sent to the server to produce an answer.
- Your IP address: used only for rate limiting, held in memory in a rolling one-minute window. It is not written to disk.
- Technical data that is logged: question type (schedule, trip, knowledge), language, response time, message length, and the titles of the sources used.
Question text is not stored
The full text of your questions and answers is not recorded anywhere by default, because "how do I get from Kadıköy to Levent" is data about a journey you are actually making. Logs contain only the technical fields above. Full-text logging can be switched on for development with an explicit setting (QA_LOG_FULL_TEXT); it will not be enabled in production without this notice being updated first.
AI processing
Your message is passed to a language model to write the reply. Depending on the deployment this is either a model running on the server itself or the Google Gemini API; where Gemini is used, your message is sent to Google and handled under Google's own terms. Departure times and routes are never left to the model — those are always computed by deterministic engines.
Retention
Technical logs are deleted automatically after 30 days. Where logs are mirrored to Firestore, the same 30-day limit has to be configured on the Firestore side as well.
Third parties
- Map tiles load directly into your browser from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org), which means your IP address and the page address are visible to that service.
- When you name a place that matches no station, that place name alone is looked up server-side via the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service.
- Transit data comes from the İBB Open Data Portal and Metro İstanbul; nothing is sent to them.
Data in your browser
The conversation is kept only in your tab's session storage, so a refresh does not throw away an answer you were reading. Closing the tab deletes it. No cookies are used.
Your rights and contact
Because the logs hold nothing that identifies you, there is no record that could be matched to an erasure request. For questions about this notice, use the contact channel in the project repository.