Privacy policy
Long Walk Back
Effective 12 August 2026. Applies to app versions below 1.0.0.
The short version
The app sends nothing on its own. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party service receiving anything. Your rides, your location and your settings stay in the app's own private storage on your phone.
The app makes one kind of request by itself, and it is a download. To draw a map
it asks api.longwalkback.com for the map of a numbered square of ground. It
sends the square's number. It does not send where you are.
One thing does go up, and only if you ask for it. You can send us a single ride — to report a problem, or to help build the range model. It never happens by itself: there is one ride per send, you tap it, and a screen states what that ride contains before anything moves. We can read what you send.
What the app handles
The app reads and stores the following, all on your device:
- Precise location. Recorded while a ride is engaged. The app needs it for the ride log, and to work out the range you need to get home.
- Motion sensors. Recorded alongside the location track.
- A connection to your vehicle. The app finds your vehicle over Bluetooth and reads what that vehicle reports while you ride.
- Basic information about your phone. Recorded with each ride, because it affects how that recording reads later.
- Your settings. The preferences you set, and the vehicles you have connected to.
Where it goes
Nothing in the list above leaves your phone by itself. Ride records, the derived calibration, your settings and every map you have downloaded live in the app's private storage, which other apps on your phone cannot read. Nobody at Long Walk Back can see your rides unless you send one.
The one thing you can send us
Settings, then Rides, then a ride: the screen offers Send diagnostics and Send whole ride. Both are one deliberate tap on one ride. There is no send-everything, nothing is sent while you ride, and nothing is sent in the background.
Before either send starts, a screen states three things, because they decide the answer:
- We can read that ride. It is encrypted while it travels, and we hold the key. It is not hidden from us.
- A whole ride holds where it started and finished. For most rides that is where you live. Send diagnostics removes every location and motion reading before it leaves, so it says when you rode and what your vehicle did, not where you went.
- A send cannot be called back. You can ask us to delete it afterwards, and we will, but we will already have been able to read it.
The screen also states how much data will leave your phone, before it starts.
What we keep, and for how long. A ride sent about a problem is kept while that question is open and is deleted afterwards. A ride you contribute to the range model is kept for two years, and it is used to build and check that model. Neither is sold, shared or used for advertising, and neither is tied to a name: the app has no account, so a sent ride carries an anonymous token and nothing else.
How to have it deleted. The same screen offers Ask us to delete it on any ride you sent, and that deletes our copy. It is the only handle there is: the token is on your phone and nowhere else, so an app that is reinstalled cannot ask about what the old install sent.
The one thing the app downloads
The app needs a map to plan a route on, and it downloads that map from
api.longwalkback.com.
It asks by square, not by position. The world is divided into a fixed grid
of quarter-degree squares — roughly 28 km across — each with a number. Your
phone works out which squares it needs, using your location, and then asks for
those squares by number. The request says q0537-0426. It does not carry your
latitude, your longitude, your speed, your heading, or how far around you the
app is looking.
So the service can tell that somebody wants the map of a 28 km square. It cannot tell where in that square they are, whether they are moving, or where they are going. We keep no record tying those requests to a person, because there is no person to tie them to: the app uses an anonymous token it gets on first run, with no account, no email and no device identifier behind it.
The map data itself is public — OpenStreetMap, plus public elevation surveys — and it travels one way: down to your phone. Nothing about your ride goes up.
You can avoid it entirely. With no network the app still records rides, still reads your vehicle, and still gets you home on the safe-return floor, which needs no map at all. You lose downloaded maps and nothing else.
Permissions, and what each one is for
| Permission | Why the app asks |
|---|---|
| Precise location | Records the ride, and works out the range you need to get home. |
| Bluetooth scan and connect | Finds your vehicle and reads what it reports. |
| Foreground service (location, connected device) | Keeps recording while the phone is pocketed and the screen is off. |
| Notifications | Keeps the app awake while a ride records, so Android does not suspend it. |
| Internet | Downloads maps from api.longwalkback.com. Nothing else uses it. |
You can refuse any of these. The app needs them to do its job, though, so refusing one will stop it working properly or at all.
The app does not ask for background location. Recording runs under a foreground service with a visible ongoing notification, so the app never reads your location with nothing running and nothing shown.
How long the app keeps data, and how to remove it
Ride records stay on your phone until you remove them.
To remove one ride, or several: open Settings, then Rides. The screen lists every ride the phone holds with its date, its length and what it costs you in storage, and you can select any of them and delete them. Deleting a ride removes the recording and everything the app derived from it.
To make the app forget a vehicle: open Settings and press Forget this wheel. That removes the pairing, everything you set for that vehicle, and everything your rides taught the app about its battery. Your recorded rides stay on the phone. What they hold about that vehicle is a private code the app made up, and after a forget it matches nothing. Connect the same vehicle again and the app treats it as one it has never seen.
To remove everything at once, uninstall the app, or clear its storage in Android settings. Both erase every ride record, the learned calibration, your settings, and any loaded map region.
Warning: neither can be undone. A ride record exists only on your phone. No backup and no server holds a second copy, so deleting a ride — or uninstalling the app — destroys that riding history permanently. The Rides screen says so before it deletes anything.
Children
The app is not directed to children under 13, and it does not knowingly handle their data. It holds no account and asks for no age, so it collects nothing that identifies a user at all.
Your rights
The app stores nothing about you off your device, so there is no account to access and nothing held anywhere we could delete on request. Your copy on your phone is the only copy, and it is under your control.
To take a ride with you: open Settings, then Rides, tap a ride and choose Share CSV. The app writes that ride as a spreadsheet file and hands it to whatever you pick — another app, a file manager, a mail draft. It goes where you send it and nowhere else. The file is a summary rather than the whole recording: speed, distance, battery and the alarms, without the per-cell readings or the sensor streams.
To delete a ride: the same screen, described above.
If a future version adds optional sync or shared calibration data, that version will ask for your explicit consent before anything leaves your phone, and this policy will change before it does.
About this website
This page is a static file. longwalkback.com sets no cookies, runs no
analytics, and loads no third-party scripts, fonts or images. We keep no access
logs for it. Reading this policy tells us nothing about you.
Changes to this policy
Material changes get a new effective date here, and a note in the app's release notes. A change that starts sending data off your device will ask you first.