Who we are
taproute is an independent business, and Popin, the link-in-bio service on popin.page, is taproute's product. We decide how the data described here is handled, on both brands. In data-protection language, we are the controller, and the same controller for taproute.io and popin.page: one business, one set of systems, one privacy notice. Payments are handled by our merchant of record, Creem, which processes your billing details directly; we never see or store your card number.
For anything on this page (a question, a request to see your data, a complaint) write to info@taproute.io. A person reads that inbox, and we will come back to you within 30 days.
If you scanned a code
Most people who meet taproute never sign up for it. They just point a phone at a code on a menu or a package. Or they tap a Popin link and open somebody's page. If that is you, this is everything that happens.
We record which code or page it was, and what your phone and the network already send with the request:
- the country, the city and region the network places you in, and a map point rounded to about 11 km. This comes from the network, never from your phone's GPS, and it cannot place you on a street.
- the name of your network provider, such as a mobile carrier.
- whether the phone is iOS, Android or something else, the browser and the operating system, and whether the visit looks automated.
- the site that sent you, any campaign tag on the link, and which version of the page you were shown if the owner is trying two.
- the time, with your local hour, the day of the week and your time zone.
- whether this is a first or a returning visit to the same owner's codes and pages, over the last 28 days at most.
- on a Popin page whose owner counts taps, which link you tapped and the site it leads to. Popin pages count taps per link from the start, because a tap is what the owner pays for and what their stats show, with no cookie and nothing that identifies you.
- on any Popin page, that a tap happened (not which link), so the owner's balance can be charged for it. That a page was opened is counted for the owner's stats and for a run-out page's daily limit; never billed.
That is the whole list.
We do not store your IP address. To tell a first visit from a returning one, our server mixes the network address and the browser's description of itself with a secret that changes every day and every 28 days, and keeps only the one-way result in a counter. When the secret changes, the old result can no longer be matched to anything. We do not set a cookie on you, we collect nothing extra to recognise your device, we do not build a profile of you, and nothing follows you to other sites. We keep no name, email, phone number or account for you.
The owner of the code, or of the page, sees these fields as totals and as a log of single visits, each with its time, place, device and browser, kept for 90 days. An owner can also have each visit sent to an address of their own as it happens, which adds your browser's language setting and the data centre that answered. They never see your network address, and nothing they receive names you.
Your browser is then sent straight to the destination the owner chose. What happens on that destination is governed by their privacy policy, not ours. On a Popin page the page itself is served by us, so this notice covers it; the links on it lead to other people's sites, and those are governed by their own policies in the same way.
What we collect from customers
If you hold an account, we hold the following.
Your account
- Your name and email address.
- Your profile picture, if you chose to sign in with Google and Google provided one.
- Sign-in records (including the IP address and the browser or device a session was started from) so we can keep you signed in, show you your active sessions, and notice suspicious access.
What you create
- Your codes and the destinations they point at.
- Any custom domain you connect, any logo or artwork you upload, and any page you ask us to host.
- Product details you enter, and the settings for any API keys or notification endpoints you set up.
Your usage
- The scan records described above, grouped under your workspace.
- Your credit balance and the history of purchases and scans it is made of.
If you came through an invite link
- If you made your Popin page through somebody's invite link, an address that looks like popin.page/join/handle, we note whose link it was, so that they can be credited when your page gets real visitors or you buy your first pack. They see only counts of the people who joined through their link and the taps they earned, never who you are. We keep that note as the record of what they were credited, until either account is deleted.
- To stop one person posing as many friends, we also keep a scrambled form of the network address you made your page from, never the address itself. We delete it once the invite is settled, at most 30 days after you made your page, unless it was held for a review of possible abuse, and then once that review ends.
When you contact us
- Your email and whatever you chose to put in it.
Keeping the service safe
- We use IP addresses for security and anti-abuse: to rate-limit sign-ups and requests so the service cannot be flooded, and, if someone reports an abusive link, to log where that report came from, so a bad actor cannot bury a rival under false reports. These uses are for protection, not to profile you, and we do not link them into a picture of you.
Pages you ask us to read
Popin can fit a page to you. If you ask it to, and only then, it opens the public pages you list, once, to read what is already on them, and writes your page from that and from your answers. Nothing is read until you have confirmed that the profiles are yours. We keep a note that you confirmed, and when. Bringing over an existing link-in-bio page is the same kind of request: you give the address, and Popin opens that one public page, once. This is not the destination check described below: that is about where a code points, and this is about pages you hand us.
What it reads
- Your name and your bio.
- The link in your bio.
- A location or a headline, where the page shows one or where you paste one.
- The profile's own public counts (followers, likes, posts), as the page shows them.
- Your latest few public items: a title and an address each.
That is the whole list. Popin reads your profile page and the link in your bio and nothing else: no lists of followers, no comments, no messages, nothing that other people posted.
What it never does
- It never logs in. No account, no cookie, no password. A page that is private, behind a login or an age check, or that answers with a challenge, is not read.
- Popin never opens Instagram, Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn or X. Those networks' rules do not allow it. For them you paste what you want Popin to use, your bio or your profile copied from your own browser, and Popin reads what you handed over without making any request to the network.
- Before it reads a profile on any other social or creator network, Popin checks that site's robots rules, and it reads nothing they disallow.
- It says who it is. Its requests are named PopinImporter and point to popin.page/from.
What is kept, and for how long
- The fields above, not the page. The page itself is thrown away as soon as the fields are taken out of it, a copy you paste is read in memory and not stored, and reading copies no pictures. The result of bringing over a link-in-bio page is held for ten minutes, so a popular page is read once.
- In your draft they live for 24 hours. If you claim your page they stay with your page's brief so Popin can write your page, and "Try another" can write it again, until you keep the result, and for 7 days at most; then they are deleted. If you never finish, they go when the draft expires.
- A short log that a read happened: which site, when, and whether that site's rules allowed it. It holds nothing the page said.
- Nothing about other people.
What Popin reads is used to build your page and for nothing else. It is not sold, and it is not used to build a profile of you.
Where the text goes
The text you gave and the text Popin read is sent to the writing service named under Who else sees it, which writes the words of your page. Popin adds nothing from your account to it: not your email address, your phone number or your billing details. What is sent is the text itself, so anything you wrote in your own bio goes with it.
Ask us to stop
If you run a site or hold a handle and you do not want Popin to read it, even when somebody lists it, write to info@taproute.io with the address. We add it to a list that is checked before every read, and we tell you when it is done. You can also ask us to delete a draft or a brief at any time, as set out under Your rights.
What we never do
- We do not sell your data, or the data of anyone who scans your codes. Not to advertisers, not to brokers, not to anybody.
- We do not run advertising and we carry no advertising or analytics trackers on the scan path.
- We do not track people across other websites, and we do not buy data about you from anyone else.
- We do not read your destinations for our own purposes. We check them against a known-threat list to protect people from malware and phishing, and that is all.
Why we are allowed to hold it
Where the GDPR or a similar data protection law applies, our grounds are these:
- To give you the service you asked for: your account, your codes, your analytics, your receipts. Without this data there is no product.
- Our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe: screening destinations for malware and phishing, acting on abuse reports, preventing fraud.
- Legal obligation: keeping records of sales for tax purposes.
We do not rely on consent for any of this, because we do not do anything with your data that would require it. We do not send marketing email unless you ask us to.
Data you collect from your own visitors
If you use taproute or Popin to host a page with a form on it, the details your visitors submit are yours, not ours. We only store them on your behalf and hand them back to you. In data-protection language, you are the controller and we are your processor.
That means it is on you to have a lawful basis for collecting them and to tell your visitors what you are doing. We will not use those details for anything of our own, and we will delete them when you tell us to. The terms for this processing are set out in our Data Processing Addendum.
How long we keep it
- Your account and your codes: for as long as your account is open. Delete your account and they go with it. An account that has had no sign-ins, no scans and no unexpired credits for six months is closed and erased · we email you four times over the ninety days first, and signing in once cancels it. A code that is still being scanned keeps your account alive whether or not you ever sign in.
- Scan records: 24 months, then removed. They are not tied to an account or a name, so this is a housekeeping limit rather than a privacy one.
- Purchase records: seven years, because the tax law that applies to us requires us to keep them.
- Abuse reports: 12 months.
- Pages you asked us to read: in your draft for 24 hours, then with your page's brief for up to 7 days until your page is written, then deleted. Details are under Pages you ask us to read.
When you close your account, your codes stop resolving straight away and everything else is erased 30 days later · that window exists so a closure you did not mean can be undone, and you can cancel it by signing in at any point before the date. Export anything you want to keep first. After that we cannot recover it. Purchase records are the one exception: tax law makes us keep them, and they are stripped of anything identifying you.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- Show you what we hold about you.
- Correct anything that is wrong.
- Delete your account and the data in it.
- Export your codes, destinations and scan history as CSV. You can do this yourself from your account at any time · Export CSV on your links page and on analytics · and you do not need a balance to do it.
- Object to something we are doing, or ask us to restrict it.
Email info@taproute.io and we will act within 30 days. We will not charge you for it and we will not make you jump through hoops.
If you think we have handled your data badly and we have not put it right, you can complain to the data protection authority responsible for us, or, if you are in the EU or UK, to your local data protection regulator.
Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to the systems holding your data is limited to what is needed to operate and support the service. Payment card details never reach us at all.
No service can promise perfect security. If a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you and the relevant regulator, promptly and without playing it down.
Children
taproute and Popin are not intended for children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account on either, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has given us data, write to info@taproute.io and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page always tells you when it last changed.
We will not use a policy change to start selling data or tracking scans. Those are commitments, not defaults.
Recent changes
- 17 October 2026 · The list of providers now includes MET Norway, which gives pages with live weather the weather for a visitor's area, rounded to about 10 km and never with the visitor's network address.
- 17 October 2026 · If you came through an invite link now says that the person whose link you used is credited when your page gets real visitors or you buy your first pack, that we keep the note of whose link it was as the record of that credit, and that we keep a scrambled form of your network address until the invite settles.
- 14 October 2026 · If you scanned a code now says that an open is also counted for a run-out page's daily limit, and is never billed.
- 14 October 2026 · opening a Popin page no longer uses the owner's taps, so If you scanned a code now says that an open is counted for the owner's stats only, and a tap is counted to bill the owner and for their stats.
- 14 October 2026 · If you scanned a code now says that Popin pages count taps per link from the start, to bill the owner and to show them per-link stats.
- 12 October 2026 · Popin now calls its unit a tap instead of a visit, so What we collect from customers says an invite link's owner sees the taps they earned. If you scanned a code now also says that on any Popin page we receive that a tap happened, not which link, so the owner's balance can be charged for it; on a page whose owner does not count taps, nothing about the link leaves your browser.
- 12 October 2026 · once you have bought taps, the photo you add to your Popin page in the editor is sent to fal to cut you out of its background, instead of being cut on your device (which dropped what people hold in their hands). Without a purchase nothing changes. The fal entry under who we share data with says so.
- 10 October 2026 · corrected If you scanned a code. It said a scan or a page visit was recorded as the country, the device type and the time only. We also record the city and region the network places you in, a map point rounded to about 11 km, the network provider, the browser and operating system, the site that sent you, campaign tags, and whether a visit is a first or a returning one. The section now lists every field and how the returning count works.
- 3 October 2026 · added Pages you ask us to read: what Popin opens when you ask it to fit a page to you, what it keeps and for how long, and how to ask us to stop reading a site. The writing service's entry now also covers the text Popin reads for you, as well as the text you type.
- 3 October 2026 · added If you came through an invite link: when you make your Popin page through somebody's invite link, we note whose link it was so they can be credited, and they see only a count, never who you are.