Your data

The short version

There are no accounts and no passwords. Your plan's link is the key to it — anyone who has the link can open the plan, so share it the way you'd share a house key. There are no ads and no tracking cookies.

What we keep

• What you told us when you started your plan: your goal hike, your recent walking, and where you usually train.
• The email address your invite was sent to.
• What you log as you train: sessions you mark done and how they felt.
• Any feedback you write to us.
• A problem you report on a route, like closed stairs. We keep which route, which problem you picked from the list, and the date, but nothing you type. Once we've checked it, other people can see it for 90 days, with nothing that points back to you.
• A generated loop you choose or mark as walked — its line on the map, with the first and last ~100 m trimmed off so it doesn't end at your door.
• A scrambled version of your internet (IP) address, used only to stop anyone making too many plans too fast. It can't be unscrambled.

What we don't keep

When you ask for a loop from where you're standing, your location is used once to ask a routing service for the walk, and not stored. Loops you look at, skip or re-roll past aren't stored either. Only a loop you choose or mark as walked is kept, as above.

Who can see it

Anyone with your plan's link. And the few people who run Sidewalk to Summit can read and delete any plan. That's how we fix problems and check how the plans are working. We don't sell your data or share it with anyone for advertising.

Services that handle it for us

• Vercel runs the app, and Neon hosts its database.
• Resend sends your plan link by email — only if you ask for it.
• Anthropic's AI writes the explanations in your plan and looks up hikes you name. It gets your plan's numbers and the goal or hike you typed — never your email.
• openrouteservice (with GraphHopper as a backup) receives your starting point when you ask for a loop. OpenStreetMap's Overpass service receives the area around the loops it finds, to look for staircases.
• OpenFreeMap draws the maps, so it sees which part of the map you're looking at. Your plan's link is never sent with those requests.

Deleting it

Every plan has a Delete this plan link at the bottom. It removes the plan, everything you logged, your feedback, any problems you reported and any loops you kept. Two things stay, with nothing linking them to you. One is a record of what the explanations cost us to produce. The other is the goal-hike lookups, which help the next person who names the same hike.

Some things are cleared on a schedule, whether or not you delete anything: what you type into a hike lookup after 90 days, the words of your feedback after a year, and the scrambled address records that stop anyone overusing the app after a week. Your plan itself stays until you delete it.

To have your email taken off the invite list, or to ask what we hold about you, write to kate@thepondsedge.com. Sidewalk to Summit is run from the Netherlands, and you have the rights the GDPR gives you: to see, correct and delete what we hold.