Map Telemetry — Privacy Policy

Effective date: 2026-05-12

Map Telemetry records your location, device motion (accelerometer and gyroscope), and ambient sound level (decibel readings only — no audio is captured or stored) during trips you start and stop yourself. Recorded data is stored locally on your device. You can optionally publish live telemetry to an MQTT broker you choose; that is off by default. The app has no user accounts, no advertising, and no analytics SDK.

Data we collect

Map Telemetry collects the following data only while you have an active recording session:

• GPS location — latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, speed, and reported accuracy.
• IMU sensor data — readings from the device accelerometer and gyroscope, used to detect events such as potholes, harsh braking, and cornering.
• Ambient noise level — periodic decibel readings sampled from the microphone. The audio waveform itself is not captured, recorded, or transmitted.
• Trip metadata — start/end timestamps, duration, and a derived driving score.

No data is collected when the app is not actively recording.

How it is stored

All recorded data is stored locally on your device. The developer does not operate a server that receives or stores your trip data. You are responsible for the security of the device the data lives on. You can delete trips from inside the app at any time, or remove all data by uninstalling.

Sharing with third parties

Map Telemetry contacts the following services to provide features. Only the minimum necessary information is sent. No personal identifier (name, email, phone) is included in any of these requests because the app does not collect any.

• OpenStreetMap Overpass — your current GPS coordinates plus a small search radius are sent to look up the posted speed limit for the road you are on.
• Mapbox Directions and OSRM — origin and destination coordinates are sent to compute turn-by-turn routes. Mapbox additionally serves map tiles based on the area you are viewing.
• Traffic and alert feeds — Ontario 511, Québec 511 (MTQ), BC 511, Alberta 511, US 511 (Iteris), Alert Ready NAAD, Transport for London, and several national DATEX II feeds (UK, France, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Australia, New Zealand). These services return regional incident lists; the app filters them client-side to your radius.
• MQTT broker (optional, off by default) — if you enable live publishing, your telemetry frames are sent to the MQTT broker you configure. With the default AWS IoT configuration, the connection uses mutual TLS with a hardware-derived client identifier so that one device cannot impersonate another. The privacy policy of the broker you choose applies to data you publish to it.

Each third-party service handles transmitted data under its own privacy policy. We do not sell your data to anyone, and we do not aggregate or resell it ourselves.

Permissions

Map Telemetry requests the following operating-system permissions:

• Location (fine, coarse, background) — to record your GPS track during a trip and continue recording when the app is not in the foreground.
• Microphone — to measure ambient noise level only. The audio waveform is never captured, recorded, or transmitted.
• Motion sensors — to read the accelerometer and gyroscope for IMU recording and road-event detection.
• Foreground service / wake lock — to keep the recording running while your screen is off.
• Internet — to query routing, map tile, traffic, and (if enabled) MQTT services.
• Receive boot completed (Android) — used by the background-service component to restore its state after a device restart.

You can revoke any of these in your device settings. Revoking core permissions (location, motion) will prevent the app from recording.

Your control

• You start and stop every recording yourself. The app does not collect data on its own.
• MQTT live-publishing is off by default. You enable it explicitly.
• You can delete trips from inside the app, or remove all data by uninstalling.
• You can export any trip to a GPX or JSON file via the system share sheet. Once exported, the destination handles the data under its own terms.

Contact

Questions or concerns about this policy can be sent to rxfnkxbhqt@privaterelay.appleid.com.