Privacy Policy
English is the authoritative version of this policy. 日本語版はこちら（参考訳）。
The short version.
Pole Lap Logger has no user accounts and no sign-in. Your recorded sessions — lap times, sector times, GPS traces and sensor data — are stored only on your device and are never uploaded to us or to anyone else. There is no advertising, and you are not tracked across other apps or websites. Two things do leave your device. One is what is required to process an in-app purchase, which Apple and our purchase provider handle rather than us. The other — only if you say yes to the question the App asks the first time you open it — is a small set of anonymous events telling us which features are used. You can decline that question, and you can switch it off again at any time in Settings.
1. Who we are
Pole Lap Logger (the "App") is developed and published by 3rd & Forward (the "Developer", "we", "us"). This policy explains what the App does with data. It applies to the App only.
The App is sold through the Apple App Store. Apple is the seller of record for all purchases; we never receive your payment details.
2. What we collect
No account, and no server of ours
The App has no account system and no login, and there is no server of ours that your recorded sessions are sent to. We do not collect, store or receive your name, email address, contacts, advertising identifiers, or the sessions you record.
Anonymous usage data, only if you say yes
The first time you open the App it asks, in a single question, whether you are willing to share anonymous usage data. If you decline, nothing is collected and the analytics component is never started at all. If you accept, you can turn it off again at any time with the “Share anonymous usage data” switch in Settings, and collection stops immediately.
While it is on, the App sends the following seven events. Every value is a fixed choice from a short list, a number, or a yes/no — never text you typed.
- A recording is started — whether the circuit is a built-in one, one you made, or free cruising; whether the GPS source is a Bluetooth receiver or the phone itself; and whether a target session was set.
- A recording is finished — the number of laps, which of five duration bands the session fell into, and the circuit's country.
- A circuit is created — its latitude and longitude rounded to two decimal places (roughly 1.1 km, a precision that identifies a circuit rather than a place), the country, and whether the circuit has sectors and a pit lane. If no lines have been drawn yet, no coordinates are sent at all.
- The analysis screen is closed — how long was spent in each of the two map modes and at what average zoom, how long speed annotations were visible, which graph axes were shown, and whether comparison, rev lines, the acceleration plot and vehicle gearing were in use.
- A session is exported — the file format only: GPX, CSV or NMEA.
- The Premium screen is opened — where it was opened from.
- A purchase completes — which plan was bought: monthly, yearly or lifetime. No price and no currency.
The analytics library additionally reports, on its own, that the App was installed, opened, updated, or sent to the background, together with the App's version and build number.
Every event also carries technical context that the analytics library attaches automatically and that the App cannot alter: the App's name, version and build number; the device's manufacturer, model, type and the name the device has been given; the operating system name and version; language and time zone; screen size and density; whether Wi-Fi, mobile data and Bluetooth are on; the analytics library's own version; and a random identifier it generates on the device for the session. We single out the device name because on Android it is a label you chose yourself, and some people put their own name in it; it is sent, but not kept — a filter on our PostHog project discards it as the event arrives, so no device name is ever stored, and like the IP anonymisation described in section 5 that is a property of our project configuration rather than something the App's own code can enforce.
Never collected: any name, note or free text you typed into the App — session memos, circuit names, vehicle names, file names; lap times, sector times, speeds or any other telemetry from a recording; your exact location; and any identifier that would let us recognise you. The App never creates a person profile with the analytics provider, and is configured so that no such profile can be created, so the events are not attached to any account or person.
We use this to see which features are actually used, so that the App can be improved, and to see the approximate areas where people create their own circuits, so that we can decide which official circuits to add next.
The App does not track you across other apps or websites and shares nothing for advertising, so it does not present an App Tracking Transparency prompt.
3. Data the App stores on your device
All of the following is created by you, stays in the App's private storage on your device, and is never transmitted to us:
- Recorded sessions: lap and sector times, GPS track points (position, speed, altitude, timestamp), accelerometer / G-force samples, session notes, and which GPS source recorded the session.
- Your circuits, control lines and sector definitions, including any you create or edit.
- Your vehicles and their settings (gear ratios, final drive, rev limit, speed correction).
- App preferences, such as the selected language, display settings, and the last-used circuit and vehicle.
- Bluetooth GPS device profiles, so a previously paired receiver can be reconnected.
- Your answer to the usage-data question, so that the App does not ask you again.
You can delete this data at any time by deleting individual sessions inside the App, or by deleting the App from your device — which removes all of it permanently. We cannot recover it for you, because we never had a copy.
Data you choose to export or share
The App can export sessions (for example as CSV, GPX or a shareable circuit file) and can open files shared to it from other apps. This only ever happens when you actively initiate it. Where the exported file goes — a messaging app, cloud storage, another device — is your choice, and the privacy practices of the destination service apply to it from that point on.
4. Device permissions and why they are requested
| Permission | Why the App asks for it |
|---|---|
| Bluetooth | To discover and connect to your external Bluetooth GPS logger, which supplies the data recorded during a session. Bluetooth is not used for anything else, and no data is sent to us over it. |
| Location | Used for three things: finding circuits near you on the home screen, reading your current position while you create or edit a circuit, and — if you choose to record with the phone's own GPS instead of an external Bluetooth receiver — supplying the position data of the session itself. In that last case the App also uses location while it is in the background, so that a session keeps recording with the screen off. Location data is processed on your device and is not sent to us. |
| Notifications (Android) | To show an ongoing notification while a GPS connection is active, so the connection is kept alive in the background. It contains connection status only. |
| Photos / Camera | The App does not use your photo library or camera and never reads them. These permission descriptions are present only because a third-party file-selection component bundled with the App declares them. Declining them does not affect any feature of the App. |
You can change or withdraw any of these permissions in your device settings at any time. Declining Bluetooth or Location disables the features that depend on them, but no other data is affected.
5. Third-party services
The App uses the following services. Each receives only what is listed and nothing more.
Apple (App Store / StoreKit)
Processes purchases and subscriptions, and provides the localised prices shown in the App. Apple is the seller of record and handles your payment information under Apple's Privacy Policy. We never see your payment method, billing address or Apple Account details.
RevenueCat
Manages the purchase receipt and tells the App whether your Premium entitlement is active. It assigns the App a randomly generated anonymous identifier, which is not linked to your name, your email address, or your Apple Account, and which we do not connect to any other information. RevenueCat also aggregates purchase information into sales and subscription reports that we can see. Those reports show totals — such as how many subscriptions are active — and never tell us who you are. See RevenueCat's Privacy Policy.
PostHog
Receives the anonymous usage events described in section 2 and stores them on its European cloud, inside the European Union. PostHog processes them on our instructions and does not use them for its own purposes. See PostHog's Privacy Policy.
Sending an event necessarily involves an IP address. IP anonymisation is enabled on our PostHog project, so the address is not retained and no location — city, region or postal code — is derived from it.
Google Maps
Maps shown in the App are provided by the Google Maps SDK. Displaying a map necessarily sends the map area being viewed to Google. This is governed by Google's Privacy Policy. We do not receive anything from Google about your use of the maps.
OpenStreetMap Nominatim
When you search for a place while creating or editing a circuit, or when the App needs to determine the country of a location, the search text or the coordinates are sent to the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service to resolve them. See the OpenStreetMap Foundation Privacy Policy. No identifier of you or of your device is attached to these requests.
6. Purchases
Premium unlocks unlimited session storage. It is available as an auto-renewable monthly or yearly subscription, or as a one-time lifetime purchase. The entitlement is tied to your Apple Account, so restoring purchases on another of your devices re-enables it there.
Your recorded session data is not transferred between devices, by design — it is stored locally on each device and never synced. Your entitlement travels with your Apple Account; your data does not.
7. Children
The App is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect any information from children. The optional usage data described in section 2 is anonymous and is not attached to any person, so there is nothing identifying a child for us to hold or to delete on request.
8. Your rights
Privacy laws such as the GDPR (EU/UK), the CCPA/CPRA (California) and the APPI (Japan) give you rights to access, correct, delete, or obtain a copy of personal data a company holds about you, and to object to its sale. We hold no data that identifies you. The optional usage events described in section 2 carry no name, no account, no contact detail and no identifier we could match to you — and we keep it that way deliberately, which also means that if you asked us to hand over “your” events, we would have no honest way to find them. What we can offer instead is the control that actually matters: you decide whether they are sent at all, and you can withdraw that consent at any moment in Settings. We do not, and will not, sell or share personal data, because we have none.
The data that matters to you is on your device, under your control: you can view it, export it, and delete it in the App at any time. For anything Apple, RevenueCat, Google, OpenStreetMap or PostHog holds, please exercise your rights directly with them using the policies linked in section 5.
9. Data security
Your session data is held in the App's private storage area, which the operating system isolates from other apps. Because your recordings are never uploaded to us, there is no server-side copy of them to be breached. The optional usage events described in section 2 travel over an encrypted connection and are held by PostHog in the European Union; they contain nothing that identifies you, so a breach of them could not expose you. Protecting the device itself — a passcode, and keeping the OS up to date — is the most effective safeguard, and that part is up to you.
10. Changes to this policy
If the App starts collecting data that this policy does not describe, this policy will be updated before that version is released, the effective date and version number at the top will change, and the corresponding App Store privacy disclosure will be updated to match. We recommend reviewing this page after a major update.
Version 2.0 (27 August 2026) — added the optional, consent-gated anonymous usage data described in section 2, and PostHog as the service that receives it. Version 1.0 described an App that collected nothing at all, which is still exactly what you get if you decline the question shown on first launch.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy, or about privacy in the App, can be sent to support. We will reply as promptly as we reasonably can.
12. This website
Sections 1 to 11 describe the App. This section describes this website.
The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It sets no cookies, stores no identifier in your browser, and does not follow you between sites or between visits. What is recorded is limited to aggregate request information — the page address, the referring page, browser and device type, and country — from which you cannot be identified. See Cloudflare's Privacy Policy.
The site is served by Cloudflare, which processes the request itself, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page and protect the service. We do not receive your IP address.
There are no advertising or tracking scripts on this site, no sign-up form, and no cookies of any kind.