Privacy

The short version

There is no sign in for travellers. Your saved trip plan, budget and vehicle details stay on your phone. Route calculations send the chosen start and destination to our routing service. We send location-based requests needed for maps and nearby places, contributions you choose to share, and optional usage counts only when you allow them. We never ask for your name. If you want one on the places and photos you add, you can pick a handle, and that is the only name we ever hold.

What stays on your phone and is never sent

• Your complete saved trip plan and nights. Individual route calculations are described below.
• Your budget, what you are spending and what is left.
• Your vehicle and what is behind it.
• Your recorded runs, including the track a run records while driving.
• Saved maps and road data kept for when there is no reception.

This is held in the app’s own storage on the device. We cannot read it, and it is not backed up to a cloud account: device backup is switched off in the app for this reason. Uninstalling removes all of it.

Route calculations

When you calculate a road route, we send its start and destination coordinates to Geoapify through our server. We keep an unlabelled copy of the returned road and directions reusable for 30 days, to avoid repeating requests. It is not linked to a traveller account or your complete trip. We keep daily totals and a daily-changing hash of the requesting IP address to limit abuse and costs. Routing maintenance removes expired cache entries after a further 35 days and usage records older than 35 days when a new route is calculated. Your recorded GPS track is not uploaded by this feature. See Geoapify privacy information.

Location

The app uses your location to show where you are on the map, to work out which road you are on, and to record a run while you drive. In a CarPlay-enabled version, it also provides guidance for the navigation session you start.

Background location. If you allow it, a run keeps recording while the phone is locked or the app is in your pocket, because that is the whole point of recording a drive. It is used only for the run you started, it stops when you stop the run, and that track stays on the phone. CarPlay guidance can also use location while the phone is locked; ending that journey or disconnecting CarPlay stops its navigation location updates. Run recording has its own stop control.

What leaves. Your coordinates are sent when you do something that needs a place attached: reporting the road, rating a camp, asking the road for a hand, or loading what is nearby. Those are sent as a position, not as a person. We do not build a history of where you have been.

What is sent, and what it carries

• Road reports and confirmations: the condition, where it is, and when. Kept and shown to other travellers. Reports stay in the record even once they are stale, because what a road was like last March is worth knowing next March.
• Camp ratings: the facts you tapped and the camp’s location.
• Asking for help: your position and your message, shown to travellers near you so somebody can come. Only when you tap it.
• Business views, taps and ads shown: only with your optional analytics setting on, a random id generated on your phone, so an advertiser can be told how many times their ad appeared without being told who saw it. It is not your device’s advertising id. It distinguishes this app installation and may link its activity. You can clear it by clearing the app’s data.

None of these carry your email or phone number, because the app has never asked for them. None of them carry a name unless you have chosen a handle, below.

Handles

You can pick a handle, like bigred, so the places and photos you add say who put them there. A verified handle is required to upload photos so we can moderate contributors. Browsing, road reports and adding an unsigned place do not require a handle. You can hide a photo contributor on your phone. Administrators can block abusive handles and hide their contributions.

Picking one is not signing up. We store the handle itself and a key your phone generates, which is what proves a contribution is yours. We do not ask for an email address, a password or a real name, and we could not send you one if you asked: the key is held on your phone and nowhere else, so if you clear the app’s data the handle cannot be recovered by us or by anybody else.

A handle is public and it links your contributions together. Anybody looking at the map can see every place and photo signed with it, so it is worth choosing one that is not your full name if you would rather people could not work out who you are and where you have been.

Road reports never carry a handle. A closure, a crash, stock on the road or stopped traffic is published with no name on it, whatever handle you hold. Nobody should have to weigh up being identified before warning people about a flooded crossing.

You can stop using a handle at any time from the same place you picked it, which removes it from your phone. To have the handle itself deleted, or your name taken off things you have already added, email admin@thelapmap.com.au.

Business accounts

Businesses listing a place do have an account. Signing in is by a link emailed to you; there is no password. We store your email address, and for each listing its name, category, description, phone number, website, nightly price and location. What appears publicly on the map is the listing. Your sign in email is not shown to travellers.

You can close the account and delete all of it at any time: how to delete your account.

Who else is involved

• Supabase holds the shared data above.
• Vercel serves the app and, only when optional analytics are enabled, processes website page counts.
• OpenStreetMap and OpenFreeMap serve map tiles and road data. Loading a map means asking them for tiles, which means they see the request.
• Lap Map and its OSRM routing provider receive the start and destination coordinates when you request a road route, including a new route after going off course.
• Apple Maps provides the basemap in CarPlay-enabled versions. Map requests are processed by Apple. Saved CarPlay destinations stay on the phone.
• State road authorities answer questions about road surfaces. They are asked about an area, never about a person.

There is no advertising network in the app. Ads are sold by us directly and served by us, which is why the app does not collect an advertising id and does not track you across other apps.

Children

The app is built for adults planning and driving a trip. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Asking us

For anything on this page, including a request to see or delete what is held, email admin@thelapmap.com.au.

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything that changes what leaves your phone will be said in the app rather than only here.