Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 2026

What we collect

When you connect a running app, Strava or intervals.icu, we receive your activities from it — runs, and also other types such as rides or walks, which we store but never count toward coverage or show to other runners — with details such as distance, time, activity type, and, where the activity has one, its GPS route. We use the route to work out which streets you covered. Of your Strava profile, we keep only your athlete ID, which links the connection to your Trace account; Strava also sends your name, photo and city when you connect, and we discard them — your name and photo on Trace start from your Google sign-in, and you can change your name in Settings. From intervals.icu we keep only your athlete ID. We do not receive or store heart rate, power, or other health metrics beyond what is included in the activity summary the app sends us. Strava, as the provider of the API Trace uses to read your activities, may monitor and collect data about how Trace uses that API, and may use it for any business purpose, internal or external, including improving its platform, providing support, and checking that Trace complies with its API terms.

When you are signed in, we also record which pages of Trace you visit and when, so we can understand how the product is used. Each record contains your account, the time, and which kind of page it was — for example “the dashboard” or “a run detail page”. We store the page type only, so which particular run, city or person a page was about is not recorded. We do not record your IP address or your device or browser details. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies, and we do not track you across other websites. We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless service, to count visits, see which sites referred them, and measure how quickly pages load. It records the page address and the referrer, not your account.

If you join the launch waitlist, we store the email address you provide and use it for two things only: to confirm your signup, and to let you know when new Strava connections open. We do not require or create an account to collect it.

How we use it

Your activity data is used to calculate your street coverage within supported cities and to show your runs, coverage maps, recaps, and stats inside Trace. Page visit data is used only by us, to see whether Trace is useful enough that people come back. We do not sell your data, and we do not use it to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. We do not share it with third parties except as required to operate the service (database hosting, error monitoring), and we never send your Strava or intervals.icu data to analytics providers.

Privacy controls

Profiles, leaderboards, and run pages are only visible to people signed in to Trace — nothing about your account or your runs is shown to signed-out visitors or search engines. Within Trace you control these separately, each set to everyone on Trace, your followers only, your friends only (runners who follow you and whom you follow back), or only you: whether your coverage is ranked on the leaderboards, who sees your coverage map and city totals, who sees the map of each run, who can comment on your runs, and who can open the lists of your followers and the runners you follow. If Strava is your run source, your coverage map, individual runs and comments are fixed to Only me — Strava limits how activity data can be shared on Trace — and stay that way for 7 days after you disconnect, until its data is removed. Your leaderboard setting is yours to choose, and it also decides who can see your per-city covered distance. The leaderboard setting works both ways — you appear on a leaderboard and can see it on the same terms, so a runner who opts out is neither listed nor able to browse it. The run map setting is enforced everywhere a run appears, including a direct link to a run, so a run nobody is allowed to see cannot be opened by guessing or sharing its address. Your profile page itself keeps showing your name, bio, and follower counts to signed-in runners, and you disappear from search only if you set all three to private. Blocking someone overrides every setting in both directions. Runners who already follow you, or whom you follow, invite, or interact with, may still see your name. Share cards you export yourself are images you choose to publish, and are the only way a run leaves Trace.

Data retention

You can disconnect your running app from Settings at any time. Disconnecting hides the runs that came from it straight away; the coverage they unlocked is cleared once 7 days have passed, when the data is permanently deleted. Reconnect within those 7 days and everything is restored. Contact us to request full account deletion.

Records of the pages you visit are deleted once they are more than 12 months old; a daily cleanup removes them. If your account is deleted, they are deleted with it.

Waitlist email addresses are used only to confirm your signup and to announce when new connections open. We keep them until you unsubscribe — every waitlist email includes a one-click link to leave the list, with no account or sign-in required — or until the waitlist itself is deleted after launch.

Contact

Questions: [email protected]