Last updated: 23 September 2026
Only the German text is legally binding, in every country. Any other language version is a translation and serves only to aid understanding. Where it differs from the German text, the German text applies.
Cuolma Privacy
This page describes what the Cuolma app (iPhone, iPad, Mac) does with data. Cuolma is free, has no account and no sign-in. For bimover’s website and account services, see the general Privacy Policy.
1. Controller and contact
bimover GmbH, Hammer 19, 5000 Aarau, Switzerland Email: privacy@bimover.ch
2. What Cuolma collects
Cuolma has no analytics of its own and no advertising identifier. The app does not report to bimover what you do with it, and for Cuolma there is no server of ours that it calls on its own. bimover still comes up twice, and both are here: in Cuolma a link leads to this page, and tapping it calls up our website like any other visit (section 3). And anyone who tests Cuolma through TestFlight is known to us, as the paragraph after next describes.
Reports and figures about Cuolma reach us only through Apple, and only if you allow sharing analytics with app developers in your device’s settings. We then see crash and performance reports, for instance when Cuolma hangs or uses a lot of power, and figures that Apple totals up across many devices, such as how often Cuolma is opened. A crash report mostly shows where in the program Cuolma crashed, along with the device model and system version. We read it to find and fix faults, and for nothing else. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in an app that does not crash (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We build no collection of our own: we look at the reports at Apple, and there they disappear under Apple’s own time limits.
If you test Cuolma through TestFlight, this does not depend on that setting. TestFlight then shows us your crash reports, how often you opened Cuolma and whatever you send us through TestFlight. If we invited you by email, your name and email address appear with it. We need that to run the test and to reply to you; the legal basis is your taking part in the test (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Your name and address stay in the test group at Apple until the test ends or you write to us. After that we take you out of the test group, and both disappear there with it.
The versions for testing and development also have a switch that fetches an older issue of the avalanche bulletin; the request to the SLF then carries the chosen date. The App Store version has no such switch.
3. What Cuolma sends where
Cuolma gets its terrain, aerial imagery and the national map from swisstopo,
the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, at data.geo.admin.ch. It gets the avalanche bulletin
from the SLF, the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, at
aws.slf.ch. The table shows what leaves your device on which occasion, and
where it goes.
| When | What | To whom |
|---|---|---|
| You open a tour, or Cuolma reopens the last one at launch, or failing that the newest one in its tour archive | the tour’s area with a 4 km margin, plus coarse terrain reaching at least 15 km past the tour for the horizon | swisstopo |
| You open an area from typed coordinates or on the map | that area with a 4 km margin, plus the terrain for the horizon | swisstopo |
| You open an area for which something is already on the device and it is more than a week old | the question whether anything newer exists for that area since last time; it carries the area and the date of what you hold, and with that the fact that this connection has fetched this area before | swisstopo |
| You tap “Where I am now” | an area 6 km square with a 4 km margin, centred on the nearest intersection of the kilometre grid on the Swiss national map, plus the terrain for the horizon; then the fine tiles above your position, because the view flies there | swisstopo |
| You tap “To me”, which moves the view to your position | the fine tiles above your position, and with them the spot where you are standing, to within a few hundred metres | swisstopo |
| You move the view | the tiles for what the view shows, and with them which part of the area you are looking at | swisstopo |
| You drag the “National Map” slider to the right | in addition, the sheets of the 1:10,000 national map for the area you are looking at | swisstopo |
| You start Cuolma or bring it to the front again, with or without a tour, and the SLF may have a new issue | the question for the whole issue of the bulletin, in the app’s language; plus the question for the warning regions, every 30 days and at once when a bulletin names a region Cuolma does not know yet | SLF |
| You take an area along under “Offline”, as “Overview” or “Finest resolution” | the files for that area at the chosen resolution | swisstopo |
| You tap “Choose on the map”, or Cuolma shows the map after “Where I am now” because it gets no position or swisstopo has no terrain for your spot | the part of the map you are looking at; if swisstopo has no terrain, it starts centred on the measured spot | Apple |
| “Sync via iCloud” is on | your tour files | your iCloud Drive, at Apple |
| You tap “© swisstopo” | a visit to swisstopo’s website, in your browser | swisstopo |
| You tap “SLF avalanche bulletin”, “slf.ch” or “CC BY 4.0” | a visit to the SLF’s website or to the licence page, in your browser | SLF, and Creative Commons for the licence |
| You tap the link to this privacy page inside Cuolma | a visit to this page, in your browser | bimover |
| You share analytics with app developers, or you test through TestFlight | the reports and figures from section 2 | Apple, and from there bimover |
Every request carries your IP address and the time, plus the identification the operating system attaches to every request of its own accord: the name and version of the app and the version of the system. Cuolma attaches no identifier of your device to any request. If one of the servers asked sets a cookie, Cuolma accepts it and sends it along next time; Cuolma itself sets none.
Cuolma reads what you took along under “Offline” from the device. While “Stay offline” is off, swisstopo still learns which area you open and supplies whatever is not on the device.
Cuolma asks the SLF the same thing: the whole issue of the bulletin. Which of the 149 warning regions belong to your tour is worked out on the device. So neither your position nor the tour you have open is in the request. It carries the app’s language and the identifier of the issue already on the device. If that is already the latest one, the SLF answers only that there is nothing new, and sends no data. The occasions for this question are the launch and every return to the front, before you tap anything. It does not go out every time, but only when the SLF may have a new issue or the last question is long enough ago. From it the SLF sees when somebody is using Cuolma, not who and not where. The only way to stop it is “Stay offline”, and that also cuts off terrain from the network.
With “Stay offline” on, Cuolma fetches no more terrain, imagery or national map from the network, not even for the horizon, and draws what is on the device. It asks the SLF nothing either, and shows the bulletin that is on the device. Nor does it load the map, whether under “Choose on the map” or after “Where I am now”. The switch does not cover locating or the iCloud sync, which Apple provides.
Apart from what section 2 describes, none of this reaches bimover. If you tap the link to this page inside Cuolma, our website opens in your browser, and our web server receives, as with every visit, your IP address, the time, your browser’s identification and the path requested. What swisstopo, the SLF and Apple do with their requests is governed by their own privacy policies. For swisstopo, see swisstopo.admin.ch; for the SLF, see slf.ch.
4. Location
Cuolma uses your location to show where you are, and to open the area around you when you ask. It asks only when you tap “Where I am now” or “To me”, and only with your permission. There are no other occasions.
Locating does not run continuously. It starts with one of those two actions and ends at the latest when you open another area or tour, or quit Cuolma. Cuolma does not ask to locate you in the background. On iPhone and iPad, locating therefore pauses while Cuolma is not on screen. The Mac makes no such distinction: there it keeps running as long as Cuolma is open, even when another window is in front.
The coordinates themselves go to no one. What leaves the device is the area, not the point: with “Where I am now”, swisstopo learns which intersection of the kilometre grid on the Swiss national map is nearest to you, because Cuolma centres the section there. The fine tiles the view then fetches above your position give it away to swisstopo to within a few hundred metres. The same applies to “To me”: the button moves the view over your spot without opening a new area, and the view fetches the same fine tiles there.
The location is not measured by Cuolma but by your device’s locating service, which Apple runs. What that service reports to Apple in the process follows Apple’s rules and your device settings, not Cuolma.
If you decline, everything else works as before. You then open an area from coordinates or with “Choose on the map”. You can change the permission at any time in your device’s settings.
5. What stays on the device
Terrain, imagery and the national map that Cuolma fetched along the way stay on the device with no time limit. How much of it Cuolma keeps is your choice, under “Offline” at “Keep”: 2, 8 or 20 GB, with 8 GB preset. Above that limit Cuolma discards what has gone unlooked-at the longest, no matter how much space is still free on the device. All of it goes at once with “Delete what was fetched on the way”. Areas you took along do not count towards this limit and are not touched by it.
For as long as these files are there, they are a dated trail of the areas you have looked at: each file stands for one section, and the device records when it was last used. They sit in the app’s own area. On iPhone and iPad no other app can reach it; on a Mac that area sits in your home folder, and a program running with your rights can read it.
An area you took along under “Offline” stays until you free it up there. “Delete what was fetched on the way” leaves it in place. For every area taken along, Cuolma keeps the name of the tour that was open at the time and the date, so that the list under “Offline” has something to show. Cuolma also keeps the horizons it worked out for your most recently opened tours. It clears older ones away itself, and there is no button to delete them.
Cuolma also keeps the bulletin and the SLF warning regions it fetched last, so it can still show them without a network. The next issue replaces the previous one, and “Delete what was fetched on the way” does not touch them.
Of every tour Cuolma was able to show, it keeps a copy in its own tour archive. The original stays where it was. If there is nothing for the area, or the file carries no point, nothing is kept. If you edit a tour and save it, Cuolma rewrites that copy, with the name from the tour card in the file and in the GPX. You can also export a tour as GPX into a folder of your choosing and save the picture of the view as a PNG; where they go is up to you in the dialogue. With “Sync via iCloud” on, the tour archive is in your iCloud Drive, and on iPhone and iPad you see it in the Files app; what you delete there is deleted. Otherwise it is on this device only, in the app’s own area, and on iPhone and iPad nothing but Cuolma leads there.
In Cuolma itself you remove a tour in the tour archive with “Remove tour”. There are two outcomes, and the app tells you which one happened: either the copy is in the trash, and you can put it back, or it is deleted. The original in your folder is untouched.
Cuolma also remembers which tours you opened last, and your settings, such as whether “Stay offline” is on. That list holds up to eight tours, and each entry carries the path to the file with it, so often your user name and the folder the tour came from. There is no button that empties the list; an entry drops out when a ninth one arrives.
Cuolma writes the measured coordinates to no file. The area, on the other hand, it does: what Cuolma fetches after “Where I am now” then sits among what was fetched on the way, with the time it was used, and an area taken along is listed with the tour name and the date.
Cuolma writes diagnostic lines into the device’s system log, readable and not
hidden: an error line the device holds back helps nobody. What stays out is
the storage path, the file name, the name of the tour and your position. What
is in it is the tile reference of the view, so roughly the area that was on
the screen. Cuolma asks swisstopo for that same number anyway, and without it
a tile error cannot be reproduced. The lines stay on the device; they leave
only in a sysdiagnose that you trigger and pass on yourself.
On a new iPhone your tours are there again, the areas are not. Cuolma keeps everything that comes from swisstopo and the SLF out of your device backup, so that your backup does not grow by several gigabytes; every device fetches the areas itself. The tour archive goes with it, and with “Sync via iCloud” on your tours are on all your devices anyway.
If you delete Cuolma from an iPhone or iPad, all of this goes with it. On a
Mac it sits in your home folder under Library/Containers/ch.bimover.cuolma,
and that folder stays after you delete the app, until you delete it yourself.
The app was previously called Tourenansicht, then TourGuide, then Zentour;
Cuolma carries its folder across at first launch, and on a Mac a folder of one
of those versions can be left behind under its own name. Anyone tidying up
should look there under the old names too. Tours in your iCloud Drive stay there
until you delete them there.
6. Children
Cuolma is not directed at children, but at people aged 16 and over. It asks no one for an account or for personal details, and we do not knowingly collect data from children.
7. Your rights
If you use Cuolma from the App Store, the most bimover holds from it is what section 2 describes, and Apple passes it on without details about who you are. We cannot find you in it, so there is nothing of it we could hand over, correct or delete. TestFlight is different: there your name and email address are held by us, and your rights apply there in full.
As far as the applicable law grants them to you, you have the right to information about your data, to rectification, to erasure, to restriction of processing, to object to processing, and to receive your data in a common format. A consent, such as the one for locating, you can withdraw at any time in your device’s settings; that takes effect from then on and not retroactively. Write to us at privacy@bimover.ch.
You can also complain to a supervisory authority. In Switzerland that is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner; in the EU and the EEA, the authority of your country of residence.
For the requests that go to swisstopo, the SLF and Apple, contact them directly. swisstopo and the SLF are Swiss federal bodies. The SLF answers the requests on its own machines in Switzerland. swisstopo delivers its data over a worldwide delivery network run by Amazon; your request, your IP address with it, thus reaches a machine of that provider, and that machine need not stand in Switzerland. Apple also processes data outside Switzerland and the EEA, including in the United States; the basis for that is the agreements Apple concludes with us as a developer, and Apple’s own privacy policy. bimover itself is based in Switzerland, and the European Commission has recognised Switzerland as providing an adequate level of data protection.
8. Changes to this page
This page changes with the app. When a feature arrives that sends or stores something, it is described here before the version containing it is released. The top of the page says when we last changed it. We do not keep older versions.