Privacy policy

Roadbook '71 · last updated

The short version: there is no account and nothing about you is collected. If you leave "Help improve routes" on, the app sends us the junctions you flag and the trace of your drive, tied to the route and to an anonymous id, never to you. You can turn it off and you can have it erased. If you choose to leave an address for our letters, that address is the one thing about you we hold, and you can take it back. The rest of this page is that at length.

No account, no tracking

The app has no account, no analytics, no advertising and no sign-in. There is no crash reporting service and no third-party SDK sitting in the app watching what you do. It does not collect your name, your email, your contacts or anything that identifies your device. This website counts two things, described under The website below; the app itself counts nothing.

Location is used on the device

The app asks for your location so it can show where you are on the route and give guidance while you drive, including in the background and on CarPlay. Guidance is worked out on the device: it needs no network, and nothing about it waits on our server. With "Help improve routes" off, your location never leaves the phone at all. With it on, the drive is also recorded and sent as described below.

Background location is what lets guidance keep running with the screen off or with another app in front. You can decline it, or grant it only while the app is in use; guidance then stops when the app is backgrounded, and everything else still works.

Help improve routes

This is the one thing the app sends us, and it is on by default because most people leave it on when it is explained honestly. The app tells you about it once, on the first drive, and the switch is in Settings.

What is sent. Two things. A report, when you tap the flag: where the car was, how far into the route, why (wrong turn, road closed, better line, missed instruction, something else) and a note if you wrote one afterwards. A trace of the drive: the GPS positions of it with their times, speeds and accuracies, thinned to one every couple of seconds. The GPX file of the route is sent along the first time we see it, so the reports have something to be about, and so is the turn-by-turn route the app built from it, with its tulip diagrams, so a drive can be read junction by junction. That route is made from the file alone, carries nothing about you or your notes, and is not published.

What it is tied to. The route, named by a fingerprint of its GPX file, so that reports from everyone who drove the same file land together. And an anonymous id the app made up when it was first used, so that your own reports and traces can be kept together and can be deleted together. That id is a random string. It is not your Apple ID, your device id, your phone number or anything else about you, and we cannot turn it back into you.

When it is sent. Everything is written to the phone first. A drive under way is sent in pieces as you go: every three minutes, and when you leave the app, the positions since the last piece go out on a background task of their own, so a phone that dies mid-drive does not take the whole drive with it. Reports go with the next piece. A short drive, or a drive with no signal, is sent in one go at the end instead. None of this touches guidance, and none of it happens with the switch off.

What it is used for. Improving the routes: seeing where the app sent people the wrong way, which roads are closed, and where recorded drives differ from the file they were driven from. Speed data is used to tell a village crawl from an open road. It is not used for advertising and it is not sold or shared.

Turning it off. Settings, "Help improve routes". Off means nothing leaves the phone: no report, no trace, not even the route's fingerprint.

Deleting it. Settings, "Delete what I've sent". The app asks our server to erase every report and trace filed under your anonymous id, throws away anything still waiting on the phone, and takes a new id, so nothing sent afterwards can be joined to anything sent before. If there is no network at that moment the request is kept and goes with the next drive's feedback.

What the App Store label says

Apple asks every app to declare what it collects, in Apple's own categories, and the label on our App Store page is the same story in that shorthand. It lists two things, both of them the "Help improve routes" data on this page:

Neither is marked as linked to your identity, because neither is: there is no account to link them to. Neither is marked as used for tracking; we do not follow you across other apps or websites, and nothing is shared with data brokers or advertisers. The label has to describe what the app can send, so it lists both even though the switch turns them off entirely.

Letters from the road

The app offers, once on its cover and from then on in Settings, to send you the occasional letter: new routes and what changed in the app. Leaving an address is up to you, and "No thanks" is the end of the question.

What is kept. The address, when and where in the app you gave it, and the anonymous id of the phone you gave it on. That last part means the reports and traces that phone sends can be read as yours, which they otherwise cannot. We say so in the app, next to the field.

Confirming. Nothing is sent to an address until it has been confirmed from the mail we send to it, so nobody can put you on the list but you.

Getting off. Every letter has a link at the bottom that takes you off the list at once, and unties the address from every phone it was given on. "Delete what I've sent" in the app unties it from that phone too, along with erasing the reports and traces. To have the address itself deleted, write to us at the address below.

What it is not. The address is not shared or sold, and it is not used for anything but these letters and the odd reply about the app.

Sharing a route as a link

Separately from all of the above, you can publish a route from the app as a link on roadbook71.com, so someone else can open it in theirs. That is something you do on purpose, one route at a time, from the share sheet at the end of the roadbook.

What goes up is the roadbook itself: the GPX, the turn-by-turn route, the tulip diagrams and the printed PDF, along with the anonymous id of the phone that published it, so that the same phone can replace it later. A published route is public to anyone with the link. Nothing about your drives goes with it, and this does not depend on the "Help improve routes" switch — it is your route you are sending, not your driving. Ask us at the address below to take a published route down.

GPX files stay on the device

Tracks you import stay on your device, in the app's own storage. The route the app builds from a track is cached on the device so it does not have to be computed again, and a drive in progress is written to disk so it can be resumed. Deleting the app deletes all of it. The only copies that leave the phone are the two described above: the trace, with the switch on, and a route you publish as a link yourself.

A GPX you export at the end of a drive goes wherever you send it, and that is entirely your choice.

Apple MapKit

To match your track to roads and to draw the map, the app uses Apple's MapKit. Route requests for segments of your track are sent to Apple's servers under Apple's own privacy policy (apple.com/legal/privacy). We do not receive any of that data, and we have no way to see it.

The website

roadbook71.com counts, for each page, that it was opened, and that someone followed a link to the App Store or to TestFlight. That is the entire list. It is how we know whether the page is doing its job, and it is the only measurement anywhere in Roadbook '71.

There are no cookies, no advertising network and no third-party script on any page. Nothing is sent to another company's servers from your browser: the count goes to our own API, which passes on the event without your IP address. The visit is labelled with a random id held in the tab and thrown away when you close it, so one visit cannot be joined to another, and there is nothing in it that could be traced back to you. If your browser sends "Do not track" or Global Privacy Control, nothing is counted at all.

Children

The app is not directed at children and collects no personal data from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be published on this page with a new date at the top. "Help improve routes" was added in September 2026; before that the app sent nothing at all. It was last changed in version 1.3, when a drive began to be sent in pieces while it is driven rather than in one go at the end, and when routes could first be shared as links.

Contact

Questions about any of this: hello@glue.blue.