Privacy Policy

Ride Beyond · Effective 17 September 2026 · Replaces the 8 September 2026 version — updated because a ride you have started now keeps its location fixes with the app off screen, so the track survives a pocketed phone, and to say what riders who are not your friends can see and how to report or block someone. The 8 September version covered Garmin sync moving onto the phone, sharing a ride card to Instagram, and controlling Apple Music while you navigate. The 5 September version had added push notifications; the 18 August one before it added live location sharing with friends, motion recording, ride photos, the anonymous community route pool, and community hazard reports.

Ride Beyond is a motorcycle ride-planning and ride-tracking app run by an individual developer (Ioan Grozea, Romania). This page explains what the app stores and why. The short version: your data is used to run the app for you, it is never sold, nothing is shown to strangers with your name on it, and you can delete all of it yourself at any time.

What we store

• Account — your email address and a salted hash of your password (we cannot read the password itself). If you sign in with Apple we store the identity Apple gives us (a stable subject ID and, when you share it, your email and name) instead of a password. Apple and email are the only ways to sign in; the app does not offer Google sign-in. Also your display name and optional profile photo.
• Rides — GPS tracks, speed and elevation, and, when your recording device provides it, heart rate. Rides come from Garmin files you upload or sync, phone recordings, or routes you navigate in the app.
• Motion data — when you record a ride with the phone mounted on the bike, the app records lean angle, vibration and impact events from the phone's motion sensors. This powers the riding analysis, the rider rating and fall detection.
• Falls — the app looks for possible falls in ride data (motion impacts and heart-rate patterns) and asks you to confirm or dismiss them. Your answers are stored with the ride.
• Live location — while the app is open, your position is shared with your friends so you can see each other riding. It is suppressed near your privacy zones, you can reveal or hide yourself at any time, and one switch in Settings turns it off entirely. Sharing stops when you leave the app, including while a ride keeps recording in the background.
• Privacy zones — places you mark (like home). Ride tracks are trimmed around them before friends see them, and live location is hidden inside them.
• Posts and photos — rides you choose to share with friends, captions, the photos you attach, and likes/saves.
• Planned routes and roadbooks — routes you plan or save, and rally roadbooks you create, edit or import.
• Reports and feedback — road observations you submit (hazards, surface conditions, points of interest), route feedback, and basic usage telemetry (which features are used, route deviations). These improve routing and the shared community map.
• One anonymous count of app opens — before you sign in, the app sends a single "app opened" event so we can tell how many people open the app without an account. It carries a random id made up for that launch and kept only in memory, the event name and the time. It carries no account, no device identifier and no location. Your IP address is used to rate-limit the request and, like every request, sits in the web server log for 90 days.
• Garage and coins — the bikes and tires you pick in the app, and the coins you earn by riding.
• Garmin rides — if you connect Garmin, the rides the phone downloads from Garmin Connect are uploaded to your account as ordinary ride files. Your Garmin email, password and session tokens never reach our server; see On your phone only below.
• Push notifications — if you allow notifications, we store the device token Apple issues for this app on your device so we can send you a friend request, a friend's new post, a like or save on your ride, a badge, a completed challenge or a bike-service reminder. It identifies the app on the device, not you, and it is deleted when you turn notifications off, sign out or delete your account. Every kind has its own switch in Settings.

What friends see, what the community sees

• Friends only — your rides, posts, tracks and live location are visible to accepted friends only (you can narrow this further in Settings).
• What riders who are not your friends can see — your username and profile photo, and on the Everyone leaderboard your distance, ride count, longest ride, climb and average speed for the period, unless you turn the Everyone leaderboard off in Settings. They never see a ride, a track, a post or where you are.
• Reporting and blocking — you can report a rider or a post from inside the app, and block a rider. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours. For anything objectionable you can also write to ioan.grozea@gmail.com.
• The community route pool — when you share a ride, its route can become a community route others may discover and get recommended. Community routes are anonymous: no name, profile or account information is ever attached, and start/end areas near privacy zones are trimmed.
• Community reports — hazard and surface observations appear on the map for all riders, anonymously. Any free-text note you add to a report stays private to you and is never shown to anyone.

On your phone only

• Garmin sign-in — when you connect Garmin, the app signs in to Garmin Connect from your phone. Your Garmin email and password go directly from the app to Garmin's own sign-in; they are never sent to Ride Beyond's servers and are never stored anywhere, on the phone or off it. The session tokens Garmin returns are kept in the device Keychain and used by the phone to ask Garmin for new motorcycle activities; those activity files are then uploaded to your Ride Beyond account like any ride you upload yourself. Disconnecting Garmin in the app erases the tokens from the Keychain and stops the checks.
• Sharing to Instagram — the ride card is drawn on your phone. Only when you tap Share to Instagram is that image handed to the Instagram app on your device (through the system pasteboard, which Instagram reads on open). We read nothing from Instagram, we have no Instagram login of yours, and nothing about your Instagram account comes back to us. If Instagram is not installed the option does not appear.
• Apple Music — if you allow it, the app shows what is playing and lets you play, pause or skip while you navigate, using the iOS music controls. It reads nothing from your library beyond the now-playing track that iOS hands it for the on-screen control, that information stays on the phone, and none of it is sent to our server or stored.

Location and the background

Location is used to draw your position on the map, to guide you turn by turn, and to record a ride you started recording. The app asks iOS only for "While Using the App" location; it never asks for "Always".

While a ride you started is running, location keeps coming in with the app off screen. That means a recording in progress, or turn-by-turn navigation along a planned route. A motorcyclist rides with the phone pocketed or the screen off, and a track that stops when the screen locks is not a record of the ride. Your phone shows its location indicator the whole time this is happening. It ends the moment you finish the recording or end the navigation — there is no way for it to continue once the ride is over.

With no ride running, leaving the app stops location entirely, and stops live location sharing with friends.

The other thing the app does while it is not on screen is a short background refresh, at most every 15 minutes, that checks Garmin Connect for a new ride and uploads it. It uses no location.

What we don't do

• We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with third parties for their purposes.
• No advertising, no ad tracking, no third-party analytics SDKs.

Services the app talks to

Maps, routing and place search run on our own server — your map activity and searches are not sent to outside map providers. Two narrow exceptions, both without your account identity: if you deny or the phone cannot get GPS, the app may ask ipapi.co for a rough IP-based position (your device's IP is visible to that service, as with any website); and our server fetches weather forecasts for route areas from Open-Meteo and the German weather service (DWD) — coordinates only, never who asked. If our own place-search index is briefly unavailable, the search text (never your identity) may fall back to the public Photon geocoder. Signing in with Apple involves Apple under its own policy, and connecting Garmin means your phone talks to Garmin under Garmin's policy.

Where data lives

Data is stored on a server in the European Union (Hetzner, Germany). Transport is encrypted (HTTPS). Sessions use bearer tokens stored on your device; the website sets no tracking cookies.

Your rights, retention and deletion

Data is kept until you delete it. You can delete individual rides, reports, roadbooks and planned routes in the app, export your ride tracks as GPX files, and delete your entire account under Profile → Settings → Delete account — this immediately and permanently removes your account, rides, motion data, posts and photos, routes, roadbooks, reports, coins, social connections and ride files from the server, and withdraws your shared routes from the community pool. Any Garmin tokens on the phone go with the app's data when you delete the app. Under the GDPR you can also email us to access, correct or erase your data.

Age

Ride Beyond is not intended for children. You must be at least 17 to use it, in line with its App Store age rating.

Contact

Questions or data requests: ioan.grozea@gmail.com. See also Support and the Terms of Use.

Changes

If this policy changes, the effective date above is updated and material changes are announced in the app.