Most social apps are built around a feed. Noovo isn't. I built it as a private utility that sits between friends, because the trips I actually wanted to plan, with the people I actually wanted to travel with, were the trips I least wanted to broadcast. Per the DataStackHub 2025 privacy report, 82% of consumers say they're concerned about how companies use their data. That number hasn't moved in five years. What moved is what people are willing to do about it.
So before any feature gets added to Noovo, I check it against one rule: would I be comfortable if my own family used this with default settings. If not, the default changes. Here's the current shape of that.
Four visibility modes, picked per trip
Every trip you create on Noovo carries a visibility setting. You pick from four options, and you can change them later:
- All followers. Anyone who follows you can see the trip. Default for casual public-ish trips.
- Include. Only the specific friends or crews you list can see it. Useful for the trip you're planning with three people, not thirty.
- Exclude. Everyone who follows you can see it, except the friends or crews you name. Useful for surprise trips and the in-laws.
- Private. Only you and the people you've invited as participants. Nobody else, ever.
Free-time windows, the open weeks you've marked but haven't filled with a trip yet, use the same four-mode system. The data Noovo holds about when you're free is treated with the same care as the data about where you've actually booked. See how free-time windows work for the longer version of why that matters.
There is no public feed
Noovo has no anonymous browse mode. No "explore" tab full of strangers' trips. No way for a person who doesn't follow you to stumble onto your plans. The map you see is the map of your network, not a global feed of everyone's travel.
This is unusual, and it's deliberate. NowSecure's 2025 mobile privacy research found that 75% of iOS apps contain at least one tracker, and 35% of iOS apps collect data they don't disclose in their App Store privacy labels. The pattern is consistent: apps that show you other people's content are usually selling your content to someone else. Noovo doesn't show you strangers, and doesn't need to.
Location is opt-in, coarse, and not for sale
Noovo has one feature that uses your device location: Nomadic Mode. It's off by default. If you turn it on, Noovo checks your coarse location at most once every 12 hours, and only if you've moved more than 50 km from your last known home base. The point is to update your displayed home city if you've actually relocated. That's it.
We never track continuous location. We never display your exact coordinates to other people. We don't sell or share location data with advertisers, because we don't have advertisers. You can turn Nomadic Mode off in Settings and all background location checks stop immediately.
Crews: the smaller circle inside the network
Most of the trips you'd actually plan aren't with all of your followers. They're with a smaller group. Noovo lets you define crews, named subsets of friends you trip with regularly. Every visibility setting can target a crew instead of "all followers." Your college group sees the Lisbon trip. Your work friends don't. Nobody has to know there are multiple lists.
Crews exist because the alternative, broadcasting every trip to every follower, is what makes most social apps untenable for the kind of life detail trips actually contain.
Block list, and you can delete your account from inside the app
The block list is the standard one: a person you block stops seeing your content and stops being able to interact with you. It's a hard fence, both directions, with no notification to either party.
The other commitment is deletion. You can delete your Noovo account from inside the app, in Settings, without emailing support and without waiting on a human review. The account and the data associated with it are removed. This is non-negotiable for me. An app you can't leave is an app you shouldn't have joined.
What Noovo knows, in one paragraph
Your account info (name, email, profile picture). The trips you've created, with the visibility you set on each. The free-time windows you've marked. The friends you follow, and the crews you've built. Coarse home-city updates if you've turned Nomadic Mode on. Anonymous crash reports. That's the list. Nothing about that list gets sold, traded, or fed into a recommendation engine for a different product.
The trips happen in the world. Noovo's job is to get out of the way.