thereby privacy
Effective 2026-08-17 · applies to the thereby iOS app and its Apple Watch companion, made by Kaolin Fire (erif.org).
thereby’s job is to watch your pace and tell you whether you’ll arrive on time. That takes your location — and almost nothing else. There is no thereby account, no login, and no thereby server that receives your trips or routes.
Location
While a trip is running, thereby uses your location continuously, including in the background with the screen locked, to track your pace and keep your ETA and alerts up to date. It also uses your location in two other situations: while a trip is armed — set up and waiting for you to leave, where thereby watches for you to move away from your starting point so it can begin the trip automatically — and while the app is open on the setup screen, to show where you are and estimate how long the trip will take. Location is processed on your device. thereby does not use your location when it is closed and no trip is running or armed.
Trip history
Your trip history is stored on your device only. It is never uploaded — there is no server to upload it to. Deleting the app deletes it.
Routing (Apple)
Routes and ETAs come from Apple’s MapKit directions service (walking, cycling, driving), and maps are Apple Maps. To calculate a route, your destination coordinates are sent to Apple; that exchange is governed by Apple’s privacy policy. thereby uses no other routing service.
Analytics & crash reports
thereby uses Google Firebase Analytics — deliberately the variant without advertising-identifier support. There is no IDFA, no ad identifier, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt because there is no tracking to ask about. Firebase Crashlytics collects crash reports.
Analytics events are counts and categories about how the app is used: trip started and finished (travel mode, whether you arrived, whether you made the deadline, rounded minutes early or late, estimated minutes), reroutes, trip edits, arming and cancelling, how a destination was set, onboarding completion, history opened, voice toggled. They do not include destination names, coordinates, or GPS tracks.
Firebase also automatically collects standard app and device information (such as app version, device model, operating system version, and session activity), and derives an approximate region from your connection’s IP address. That collection is Google’s; it is described in Google’s privacy documentation.
Optional trip recording
A developer-support setting, “record trips,” can save a raw GPS trace to your device so that you can share it manually (for example, to help diagnose a bug). It is off by default, and the app never uploads these recordings anywhere.
What thereby doesn’t do
- No selling of data, to anyone, ever.
- No third-party advertising SDKs.
- No account, no login, no thereby server.
Changes & contact
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted at this address with a new effective date. Questions: kaolin@erif.org.