Privacy

What the app records

If you opt in, the app notices when you're driving one of the tracked corridor routes: US-191 through the Gallatin Canyon, MT-64 up to the resorts, and onward to Yellowstone West. While you're on those roads it records the moments you pass mile markers, a GPS breadcrumb trail along the route, and where traffic slows or stops. Off the tracked roads it records nothing, and it never records where a trip began or ended beyond the corridor itself.

The special, not secret, sauce of the whole thing is that in particular it records exactly what is happening in the cellular dead zone and shares that as soon as data reconnects. So unlike the navigation apps we'll actually have some idea of how things are in that black hole.

Trips upload tagged with a random token the app creates on the fly. There is no account and I never ask for your name, email, or phone number, so a trip can't be tied back to a person. The public-facing server that receives a trip holds it only until the machine that does the analysis collects it, a few minutes at most, and then it lives in the archive described below. If you never opt in, the app records nothing at all and simply shows you the canyon status. (But please opt in, the more of us who share the more accurate the information is!)

That token is a random number with no account, no email, and no stored IP address behind it. It is kept in the phone's keychain rather than alongside the app's own files, so it stays the same if you delete the app and install it again. That is deliberate: it keeps the same hazard reported twice from being counted twice, and it keeps my sense of how many people use the app from drifting upward every time somebody reinstalls.

If you tap a button to report something on the road, what I get is the category you picked, where you were when you tapped, and when. There is nowhere in the app to type anything, so no free text, no photos, and no comments ever reach me.

The app also sends me small technical notes about its own behavior: that it launched, that it started or finished timing a trip, whether an upload worked. These remain anonymous, never contain your location off the tracked roads, and exist so I can fix the app or analysis when it misbehaves.

How long I keep it

I keep the anonymous summaries indefinitely. Forecasting canyon conditions takes years of lookback: a snowy Friday in January doesn't mean much until you can compare it with other snowy Fridays in other Januaries. So the anonymous driving records stay in the archive, on a server I run myself rather than rent from a big cloud provider.

What I will and won't do with it

I will use the records to show live canyon conditions, to build predictions and alerts, and to understand how weather and traffic behave in the corridor. I won't sell them, rent them, or hand them to advertisers, and there's nothing personal in them to hand over anyway.

If aggregate canyon data could someday help the people who maintain and patrol this road make it safer, sharing it would fit the reason this app exists. It would be the same anonymous records described above, nothing more.

Road and weather data

The conditions, weather, and incident information shown in the app comes from public sources: the Montana Department of Transportation, the National Weather Service, the National Park Service, and similar agencies. That data flows to you, not from you.

Apple's part in it

The app comes from the App Store. If you send feedback or the app crashes, Apple passes that report to me along with basic device information. Apple also tells me how many people downloaded the app, in aggregate, with nobody named. All of that runs on Apple's systems under Apple's privacy terms.

If you leave a tip, Apple handles the payment. I never see your card, your billing address, or your name. The app records nothing about the transaction, and tipping is not connected to your driving records in any way. If you are someone in a position to sponsor the app infrastructure in a more substantial way, get in touch with me directly.

This website

No analytics, no cookies, no trackers. The server keeps ordinary short-lived access logs so I can tell if it's on fire, and that's all.

Questions

Ask the neighbor who made it: joe@pantuso.com. There are more answers on the support page. If this policy ever changes in a way that matters, the change will be announced in the app, not slipped in quietly.