Ride tracking and privacy: what your app knows about you

Most privacy policies are written to be survivable in court rather than useful to a reader. This is the version that is actually useful: what a ride tracker knows, why that matters more than it sounds, and the specific questions to ask before you hand any app a year of your movements.

What ride data actually reveals

A single recorded ride looks harmless — a line on a map, some speeds, a date.

A season of them is a different object entirely:

• Where you live. The point most of your rides start from at 8am on a Sunday is your driveway. No inference required.
• Where you work. If you commute on the bike, five traces a week converge on a building.
• When you are out. Timestamps across a year describe a routine, which describes when your house is empty and your garage has one fewer bike in it.
• Who you ride with. Group rides link your movements to other people’s.
• Where you ride alone, and how fast. Speed data attached to a location and a date is the sort of thing riders would not volunteer to a stranger.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary by-product of the feature you actually wanted, which is why the handling matters.

The three questions to ask any app

Ask these of us, and of everyone else in the category.

1. Is location data sold, shared or brokered?

The answer you want is a clean no, including “anonymised” sharing. Location data is famously hard to anonymise: a handful of points identifies an individual with high confidence, because almost nobody else sleeps at your house and works at your office.

Ours: no. Not sold, not brokered, not used for advertising, and there is no advertising in the app.

2. What is public by default?

This is where riders actually get caught out. Apps with a social feed frequently default new rides to visible, and the first ride you record starts at your front door. By the time you notice, the ride is in a public feed with a start pin on your house.

Ours: nothing. Rides are private to your account until you deliberately share one. The ridden-roads map is never public — it is not a leaderboard and there is nothing to compare.

If you use an app with a public feed, check for a privacy zone setting that blurs the start and end of rides near home, and turn it on before your first ride, not after.

3. Can you get your data out, and can you get it deleted?

Export means GPX for your routes and rides. Without it, your history is a hostage.

Deletion means the data, not just the login. Ours is self-service at /delete-account, and it removes rides and the ridden-roads data derived from them.

What we collect, specifically

Being concrete is more useful than being reassuring:

• GPS during an active ride. Position, speed and timestamps, recorded from the moment you start a ride until you end it. Not before, not after, not in the background.
• Sensor data during an active ride. Accelerometer and gyroscope, used for crash detection and lean angle.
• Map-matched roads. The derived list of roads you have ridden, which is what makes the map and the avoid-visited routing work.
• Account basics. Email, and whatever you choose to put on a profile.
• What you deliberately share. Trips you share, groups you join, hazards you report.

Because we run our own routing rather than renting someone else’s, your route requests are not handed to a third party as a side effect of how the app works. That is structural, not a policy we could quietly reverse — and it is part of why the app can be free.

Sharing, and how to do it without leaking

Sharing is genuinely useful — that is why live position sharing and shared trips exist. Some habits that keep it sensible:

• Prefer per-ride links that expire over permanent always-on sharing.
• Revoke a link when the reason for it has passed.
• Think before posting a ride publicly to social media if it starts at home. Trim the first and last few kilometres, or start the recording down the road.
• Remember that a photo’s location metadata is a separate leak from the app entirely.

What good looks like, as a checklist

Print this and use it on any app, including ours:

• Location data is not sold or shared with third parties.
• Nothing is public by default.
• Recording is bounded to an active ride, not always on.
• There is a privacy zone or trimming option for rides that start at home.
• Shares are revocable and expire.
• Full export is available in a standard format.
• Account and data deletion is self-service, not an email to support.
• The privacy policy is readable in one sitting.

We wrote ours to pass that list. Read the policy and hold us to it — that is the only sort of trust worth extending to something that watches where you go.