How googlymaps works

Last updated: [NEEDS DECISION: PUBLICATION-DATE, not yet published]

Googly eyes make the world funnier. Somebody, somewhere, has already snuck a pair onto a fire hydrant, a garden gnome, or the family dog. googlymaps is the map of every one of them, and you're invited to add the next pin.

Here's everything you need to know, in about three minutes. The formal versions of these rules live in our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy; where this page and those documents differ, those documents are the ones that count.

What counts as a googly eye

Any actual, physical googly eye, or a very convincing pair of stick-on wiggly eyes, stuck, taped, glued, magnetised, or otherwise attached to something in the real world. Classic craft-store eyes, giant novelty ones, homemade paper-and-marker eyes: all fair game, as long as they're really there, really attached, and really photographed.

What doesn't count: eyes added with a photo filter or editing app, eyes drawn on digitally afterwards, eyes that are just part of an object's normal design (sorry, that emoji mug doesn't count), or a photo of somebody else's googly eyes ripped from the internet. We want real eyes on real things, out in the real world.

Animals and pets are absolutely allowed. The family dog, the neighbour's cat, a very patient tortoise: all fine, as long as the animal is comfortable, the eyes are applied safely, and you take them off afterwards.

Taking a good photo

Three things make a submission sail through:

• Get close enough to actually see the eyes. If a human squinting at your photo can't tell there are googly eyes in it, our checker can't either.
• Show what they're stuck to. Part of the fun is the object: a mailbox, a cactus, a vending machine. Frame it so the eyes and their new home are both visible.
• Use decent light. You don't need a studio, just enough light that the photo isn't a dark blur. Outdoors, daytime, not looking straight into the sun. That's plenty.

Permissions the app will ask for

The first time you submit a pin, your phone will ask you to allow two things. We ask for each one only when we actually need it, and we explain why before the system prompt appears:

• Camera. So you can take the photo inside the app.
• Precise location. So the app can record exactly where the googly eyes are, and put the pin there. This location becomes public on the map.

You can change or revoke either permission at any time in your phone's settings, but both are genuinely required to post. There is no way to post a pin without a GPS fix. You cannot tap the map, drag a pin, or type in coordinates, and turning precise location off doesn't unlock an alternative; it just means you can't post until you turn it back on. Browsing still works fine.

Location and privacy

When you submit a photo, the app records the coordinates of where the googly eyes are, read from your device's GPS and from nothing else, and that location becomes public on the map alongside your photo. That's the whole point. It's a map. So:

• Only submit a pin from the actual location of the googly eyes. Putting a pin somewhere the eyes aren't is against the rules.

• Think about what a public pin at that spot reveals. A pin on a lamppost outside a shop is fine. A pin that shows exactly where you live is something to think twice about, and once it's published, anyone can see it.

• The photo that goes on the map has its hidden camera metadata (EXIF) stripped and the file re-encoded first, so the extra data your camera embeds (the more precise GPS fix, the device details, the timestamp) doesn't travel with the published photo. The same stripped copy is what goes to the automatic checker. Nothing unstripped is ever published or sent anywhere outside.

  To be precise about the rest of the sequence, because it matters and because this page used to overstate it: the file leaves your phone as your camera produced it, over an encrypted connection, and that original is kept, EXIF and all, in a private area where you can reach yours and a moderator can reach one they're reviewing, and nobody else can. It's what an appeal is decided against and what the published copy is made from. It's deleted 14 days after a rejection, and with the pin or with your account otherwise. Doing the strip on the phone, so the untouched file never leaves it at all, is decided and being built; it isn't how it works today.

How precise the pin is, and how we say so. A pin needs a GPS fix accurate to 50 metres or better; anything worse is refused. Fifty metres is the floor rather than the aim. The app keeps asking for a sharper fix while you're framing the shot and keeps the best one it gets. Every pin then shows how accurate it is: a circle around it on the map, and a line on its detail page reading something like "accurate to about 40m". Someone walking out to find the eyes deserves to know whether they're looking for a doorway or a street. The published figure is rounded up to the nearest 5 metres, so it's one of ten numbers between 5 and 50 rather than your phone's exact reading. That's partly because nobody needs "accurate to 37.4 metres", and partly because an exact per-device figure sitting next to an exact coordinate is a faint fingerprint of your handset. You see the precise number on your own pins.

To be clear about what EXIF stripping does and doesn't do: it removes the hidden extras. It does not hide the pin's own coordinates, which are public by design. No system is perfectly secure, and we can't promise nothing will ever go wrong. What we can tell you is exactly what we publish, which is the photo, the coordinates, and how accurate they are, and nothing else. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

A pin has no title and no description

There is nowhere to type anything on a pin. No caption, no title, no note, no tags. This is deliberate and it isn't coming later.

Every word a user could write is a word nobody has checked, published on a map that anybody can browse, and our automatic checker only ever looks at images. Removing the text box removes the hole entirely. The photo says what it needs to say, and where it is says the rest.

Your name isn't on your pins

Pins are anonymous. Somebody browsing the map sees the photo, the spot, and how accurate the spot is. They do not see your name, any name at all, a picture, an account number, or a handle. There is no profile page to click through to (none exists anywhere in the app), and there is no code or colour or badge that would let them spot that two pins came from the same person. As far as the public is concerned, every pin stands on its own.

Your account does carry a name internally, so our own records make sense. It is never published: not on a pin, not on the chart, not anywhere another user can see it. If you signed up with Google or Apple, that name is one we generated (googly_ and a few characters): we deliberately don't take the real name those providers offer us, because we never asked for it and an app built on anonymous pins shouldn't collect one as a side effect of which button you pressed. If you signed up on our own form and typed a name, that's the one, and you can change it whenever you like. The opaque handle on the chart (below) is a different thing again: we generate it, it isn't a name, and it never appears on a pin.

Four honest footnotes to that:

• You can still see your own. Sign in, and your pins are marked as yours in your view of the map, so you can find them or delete them. That marking is computed for you and shown to nobody else.
• Blocking hides one photo, not a person's whole map. Block from a pin and that photo goes, for you. The same account's other photos stay exactly where they were. That's deliberate: if blocking made someone's whole footprint disappear, the act of blocking would tell you which pins share an owner, which is precisely the link this section says strangers can't make. Earlier drafts of this page described that leak as current. It was closed, and blocking is per photo now. It costs you a tap per photo, and we think that's the right way round.
• We can tell, and so can our moderators. Behind the scenes every pin is stored against the account that posted it. That's how we delete your pins when you ask, and it's how we deal with somebody who abuses the map: a moderator handling a report can see whose pin it is and what that account has done before. We'd rather say that plainly than imply nobody can ever tell. What we don't do is hand that over to whoever reported the pin.
• Sponsored pins are the exception, and they're the other way round on purpose: a business pays to be on the map and to be named, so those pins are labelled "Sponsored" and carry the business's name. That's a company, not a person, and it never applies to a pin you posted.

One thing anonymity can't fix: a photo plus an exact location can still point at you all by itself. A pin outside your own front door is a pin outside your own front door, whether or not your name is on it. Anonymity means strangers can't join your pins up into a picture of you; it doesn't make any single pin safe to post from somewhere you'd rather not be placed.

Points, and the chart

Every new googly eye you post is worth 10 points, and there's a public chart showing who's ahead.

New is doing the work in that sentence. The same pair of eyes photographed from five angles is one googly eye, not five: each accepted photo is fingerprinted with a perceptual hash, a signature of what the picture looks like, not of the file, and a rotated, re-cropped, or recompressed version of something you've already had accepted is recognised as the same eyes and scores nothing.

Here is the split that matters, and it is not the usual one:

• Public: your rank, your points, and an opaque handle. The handle is a short code we generate. It isn't a name you picked, it isn't your email, and it isn't something anyone can look you up by.
• The chart is rebuilt on a schedule, not live. Points land on your account the moment a photo is accepted; the published chart catches up on its next refresh, about once a day. Nothing is lost in between, it just isn't instant. Refreshing on a timer rather than in real time is also what stops the chart from being a clock: a rank that ticked up the second a pin appeared would quietly tie that pin to that handle.
• Private: everywhere you've been. Nobody but you can list your pins. Not by clicking your handle, not by clicking your score, not through any screen in the app or any address on the website. There is no such page, because we didn't build one.

Why bother with the distinction? Because a score is a number and a pin list is a movement history with timestamps attached. Publishing the first is a scoreboard. Publishing the second would hand a stranger the answer to "where does this person spend their evenings", which is the one thing this whole design is arranged to prevent.

What happens after you submit

1. Automatic check. Your photo is checked by an AI image reviewer to confirm it genuinely shows physical googly eyes and doesn't contain anything explicit or unsafe. This happens in seconds.
2. Usually: instantly live. If the check is confident, your pin goes straight onto the public map. No waiting around.
3. Sometimes: a short queue. If the photo is ambiguous, it's held for a human to look at rather than being auto-rejected. We aim to decide these within 7 days, and usually much sooner. Grey areas always go to a person. Googly eyes stuck to the backside of a classical statue is the standard example: public art, centuries old, nobody's idea of explicit, and precisely the sort of thing an automatic checker calls wrong. Nothing in that zone is ever turned down by a machine.
4. An ad. After a successful submission you'll see one full-screen ad. That single interstitial, plus the ads on content pages, is how the app stays free. The map itself is never covered by an ad, and nothing ever overlays the map view. (And if you'd rather skip the ads entirely, see below.)

There are limits on how many pins you can submit per hour and per day, to keep the map from being flooded. If you hit one, the app tells you when you can post again.

If you'd rather not see the ads

You can turn them off. One payment of US$3, or A$4.50, EUR3, GBP2.50, and that's the last ad you'll ever see here. Once, not monthly. No subscription, no renewal, nothing to remember to cancel. The price you see at checkout is the price; inside the iOS and Android apps, Apple and Google handle the payment and show it in your own currency.

It's tied to your account rather than your phone, so it follows you: buy it on the laptop, sign in on your mobile, still no ads. It doesn't buy anything else, and that's on purpose. Supporters don't jump the moderation queue, their pins don't get shown more often, and the rules apply to everyone exactly the same. It just makes the app quieter.

Three honest notes before you decide. The first: if you ever delete your account, the ad-free upgrade goes with it and we can't restore it. That's not us being difficult. When you ask us to erase your data, we erase it, and that includes the link between you and what you bought. We'd rather keep that promise than keep your payment details on file forever. Deleting the app is fine; sign back in and everything's where you left it.

The second, which is the flip side of the first and is not our choice: the bare transaction record survives for five years. Australian tax law requires the operator to keep business records for five years, and a purchase is a business record. So the date, the amount, the currency and a transaction identifier stay, even if you ask us to erase everything else. That record is never published, and it is never used to give a purchase back to a re-registered account. If you want nothing at all kept about you, the answer is to not buy the tier, which costs you nothing, because the app is free.

The third: nothing else in googlymaps costs money, and it never will. Posting, browsing, reporting, appealing: all free. This is the only thing we sell, and honestly, the ads pay the bills fine without it. Consider it optional in the truest sense.

The full purchase and refund terms are in the Terms of Use, Section 10.

If your photo gets rejected

It happens: blurry shots, eyes too far away, digitally added eyes, or something in frame that shouldn't be there.

• You can appeal, right from the app, and a human will take a second look. You have 7 days to appeal, and we aim to answer within 7 days. You get three appeals on the same pin, not one; after that the decision stands.
• A rejected photo is never published, and it isn't left sitting around. We keep it for 14 days, long enough that the appeal window closes while there is still something for a moderator to look at, and then it's deleted.
• A human moderator may look at a photo that was never published, either because it was ambiguous or because you appealed. Nobody else sees it.

Appealing is safe. Say so out loud.

An honest appeal is never punished, whether you win it or lose it. If you genuinely believed your photo was fine and we disagree, that is where it ends. No warning, no strike, nothing on your account.

We are stating that flatly because the alternative quietly destroys the system. If appealing carried the faintest risk, honest people would stop appealing, and every mistake the automatic checker made would turn into a user who left. We would rather read a hundred appeals that go nowhere than lose one person who was right.

So the appeal screen asks you to explain, including the uncomfortable part: tell us why this might look borderline. "It's a statue, and yes, it's a bare backside, but it's a 400-year-old one in a public square" is exactly the right thing to write. That isn't a confession. That's the appeal working.

What actually gets you banned

The penalty is for lying, not for being wrong.

The gap between the third row and the fourth is the whole of it. The third is somebody who was wrong. The fourth is somebody who knew and argued anyway.

A ban is permanent, and deleting your account doesn't clear it

Banned is banned: not for thirty days, but permanently. And it has to outlive your account, or it means nothing at all: delete, sign up again, back in five minutes.

So we keep a one-way hash of the sign-in identifier you were banned under, indefinitely. When anybody creates an account, we hash the new identifier the same way and check the list. A match doesn't get you an account you then can't use; the sign-up is refused outright. And changing your email address while banned doesn't shake it off, it just adds the new address to the list.

The honest detail, because there is a trade-off in it. A one-way hash can't be turned back into an email address. We can't read the list and it doesn't tell us who you were. But to make the check work, the hashing uses one fixed value across the whole app, which means the same email always produces the same hash. That is exactly what lets us spot a returning banned user, and it is also what makes the list less unreadable than a per-user salt would. We chose the version that works, on purpose, and we'd rather write that down than let you discover it.

Nothing else survives a deletion. The ban record and that hash are the whole of it; the pins, the photos and the account data go. The Privacy Policy says the same in Section 5.

What not to photograph

To keep the map fun and safe for everyone, please don't submit photos with:

• A person as the subject. googlymaps is about objects, not people. Pets, statues, and inanimate objects are all fine; a recognisable person as the point of the photo is not. Someone wandering through the background of an object shot may be OK, but avoid recognisable faces where you can.
• Anything explicit, gory, or otherwise NSFW. This one shouldn't need explaining. It won't publish. A photo rejected on content grounds gets you a warning and nothing worse, but explicit content posted with evident intent is a permanent ban with no warning first. See "What actually gets you banned" below.
• Someone's home or private property, in a way that pinpoints exactly where a specific person lives. Front doors and house numbers make a location too personal to publish. Save the eyes for public and semi-public spots instead.

One honest caveat: the automatic check looks for two things: real physical googly eyes, and explicit or unsafe content. The rules about people, private homes, and honest locations are enforced by human moderators, mostly when somebody reports a pin. So a pin being live doesn't mean a person has confirmed it follows every rule. If you see one that doesn't, report it.

A quick note on process: your photo is sent to a third-party AI service (a model provided by Anthropic) to run the automatic check. Anthropic does not use it to train their models. That's covered in full in our Privacy Policy.

Who can post

You need to be at least 16 to post a pin, anywhere in the world, no exceptions. We ask for your date of birth once, and here's the bit worth being precise about: the check happens when you post, not when you sign up. Your first pin won't go through until you've passed it.

Why not at signup? Because signing in with Apple or Google doesn't hand us a date of birth at all, so refusing to create the account would have broken those sign-in buttons for everybody. So the account can exist first; posting is what waits on your age. If you do type in a date that makes you under 16, it's turned down on the spot.

And then we throw the date away. We check it, we record the moment you were confirmed to be old enough (a timestamp, nothing more) and the date of birth itself is never written to the database. We don't keep your birthday. Once the check has run, the app has no use for it, and a date of birth is permanent, unchangeable identity data that would sit there being a liability for years. This is decided and being built; until it ships the date is still stored, and we'd rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.

The 16 is enforced by the database itself rather than by the app on your phone, so there's no build of the app, and no request made outside it, that can talk its way past the check.

There's no parental-consent route either: if you're under 16, you can't post, and a parent can't sign up for you.

Browsing the map, though, is open to absolutely everyone. No account, no age gate, no date of birth.

Reporting a pin

See something on the live map that shouldn't be there? Every pin has a Report button on its detail page. Tap it, pick a reason, and, if you can, add a sentence about what's wrong. No login required to report.

Here's what we do with it:

• We confirm we got your report straight away.
• We review and decide within 7 days. Reports about child safety or threats of harm jump the queue and get dealt with as fast as we physically can.
• A reported pin normally stays visible while we look at it, unless it's in one of those most serious categories, in which case we hide it first and decide afterwards.
• If we take a pin down, we tell the person who posted it why, and they can appeal.

Reporting without an account: the small print, because it has some. That route is open to anyone on the internet, so it's protected by a captcha and capped at five anonymous reports an hour from one source. We don't store the address it came from; we store a one-way hash of it with a counter, and that's deleted after 24 hours. Only a pin that's live on the map can be reported this way.

Two consequences worth knowing before you use it:

• The confirmation is deliberately the same whatever we find. It doesn't tell you whether that pin exists, whether it's still up, or what state it's in. Every pin's identifier is public, so an answer that varied would let anybody use the report button to work out what we'd taken down. That's a privacy control for the person who posted the pin, not us being cagey.
• If you want to know the outcome, leave us an email address in the form, or write to the address at the bottom of this page. An anonymous report gives us nothing to reply to. We still review it on the same timescale.

You'll need an account to appeal a rejection of your own pin, but not to report someone else's.

Not a user, but you're in a photo? If a pin shows you, your property, your shopfront, or your vehicle, use the same Report button, with no account needed, or email us at the address below. Same queue, same 7 days.

Blocking someone

If a photo is bothering you, you can block from it. There is no profile page to block from: pins don't carry one, and no such page exists anywhere in the app. Blocking is completely private: the other person isn't told, and there's no way for them to find out. Your hidden list lives in your settings, showing the photos you hid so you can recognise them and unhide any of them whenever you like.

What it hides is exactly the photo you blocked. Not that account's other photos. Hiding somebody's whole footprint on demand would tell you which pins share an owner, and that's the one thing the anonymity design exists to prevent: block one pin, watch what else vanishes, unblock, repeat, and you could sort a whole neighbourhood by author in an afternoon. Rate limits don't fix that and neither does making blocks permanent, so the filter works on the photo you named instead. A photo you'd already been shown and already picked out, so what disappears tells you nothing new.

The cost is honest and it's yours: a second photo by the same person is a second tap, and you can't silence an account in advance. We'd rather charge you a tap than hand everyone a tool for taking the map apart by author.

We do record the block against the account behind the scenes, because an account lots of different people block is a signal our moderators act on. That record never decides what you see, and you're never shown it. Blocking never tells you who anybody is.

One thing it doesn't fix, so you hear it from us: if somebody deletes their account, all their pins go at once, so several of your hidden photos can disappear from that list together. Anyone watching the public map sees the same thing happen, with no block involved. We run deletions in batches to blur it.

Blocking is personal: it hides something from you. If content actually breaks the rules, please report it as well, so we can deal with it for everyone.

Getting in touch

One address does everything. There is no phone number and no contact form, just this mailbox, and a real person reads it.

• Reports, takedowns, appeals, and anything legal: [email protected]
• Privacy questions, or to get your data or delete it: [email protected], the same address
• Who runs this: Mr Luca Intini, a sole trader in Australia (ABN 55 717 595 882), U 36 18 Wellington St, East Perth WA 6004, Australia. One person, not a company.

Nothing is sent from or received at an @googlymaps.net address. If you get mail from one claiming to be us, it isn't.

That's it. Go find some eyes.

Last update: 2026-08-25 AWST