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A plain-language summary. The privacy policy is the authoritative version.
This page explains the practical shape of it. The privacy policy is the document that governs.
We store what you gave us — name, username, email — plus the hikes you build, the hikes you log, the historic markers you record, your ratings and your suggestions. Your profile and the hikes you've published are public; your logged hikes and badges are public too unless you turn that off (see "Your public profile" below). Your email address is never public.
You can download a copy of every hike and photo you've contributed at any time — see Exporting your data. The zip is kept for 24 hours so you can download it, and then deleted.
Photos you've added to a published hike or stop also show together on your profile, each linking back to that hike. A photo only appears there while it's visible on the hike's own page, so taking a hike down, or removing a photo and publishing the hike, removes it from your profile too.
A password is entirely optional — see Signing in with an email code — and if you never set one, we never store one. When you do set one, it's checked against a public list of breached passwords using a partial hash of it — the password itself never leaves the site. At sign-up we also record that you confirmed you're old enough to hold an account, and when.
We also store whether you're posting content as yourself or on behalf of an organization, and if so, the organization's name and type. This is never shown on your public profile or on any hike page — it's kept private, the same as your email address. You can set or change it from profile settings.
Organizations you add or join are separate from that private answer. An organization's name is shown as the credit on its hikes, and its website can appear on a hike's Credits tab once a hike is published for it. Who belongs to an organization isn't shown to the public.
If you ever change your username, we keep a record of the old one so nobody else can register it and be mistaken for you — see Choosing a username.
A one-time sign-in code we email you is deleted automatically 30 days after you requested it, whether or not you ever used it.
Signing in, changing your password, username or email, and closing your account are recorded in a technical security log, kept for 90 days — never the code, password or new address itself, only that the action happened and a one-way hash of the IP it came from, the same kind of hash described below.
If you make a private preview link for a draft, we keep only a one-way hash of the link, when it was made and when it was last opened, and delete it shortly after it expires. We cannot read the link back, so it is shown to you once.
Your profile page always shows your name, username, bio, the hikes you've published, and any badges you've earned — badges are shown off to everyone and never carry a date for a stranger. By default your profile also shows your completed hikes and your current weekly streak, and a stranger sees the month and year of each, not the exact day. A setting in your profile — "Show my hiking activity on my public profile" — lets you turn that off: with it off, a stranger sees your header, published hikes and earned badges only — no completed hikes, no dates, no streak. You and site administrators always see the full page, with exact dates, regardless of this setting.
Search engines may list your profile page by default, showing your name, username, bio, the hikes you've published and your earned badges, the same things any visitor sees. A second setting in your profile, "Show my profile in search engines", turns that off: your profile stays open to anyone with the link, but search engines are asked to leave it out and it is removed from our sitemap. It takes effect as soon as you save, though a search engine can take a while to drop a page it has already listed. A profile with no published hikes is never offered to search engines. Your completed hikes, streak and dates are never part of what search engines are shown, whatever this setting says. Closed accounts are never listed.
Historic markers you record don't appear on your profile unless you choose to show a find there. A find you show appears as a small photo with the marker's title and the month you found it; with "Show my hiking activity" off, a stranger sees it without the month or the hike.
So that the same marker isn't recorded twice, other members who have joined the marker hunt may see a small photo of a marker you recorded when they record a marker nearby, under Is it one of these?. It doesn't show your name or the date you found it. Your full-size marker photos and where you stood are never shown. See Finding markers.
Favouriting a hike or a photo, rating, and reporting a problem — with a hike or with a photo — without an account all use a pseudonymous identifier derived from your browser session. It exists to stop the same visitor doing the same thing repeatedly, and to let obvious automated abuse be pulled.
Alongside it we keep one-way hashes of your IP address and browser details — not the values themselves, and computed with a secret key we never publish. They exist only to notice that a hundred ratings arrived from one place at once. Those hashes are cleared automatically one year after you vote, rate, suggest, favorite a photo, or report — the vote, rating, suggestion, heart or report itself stays, only the hashes go.
On public pages such as the home page, the hikes directory, hike pages and the support section, a bar along the bottom asks whether we may use Google Analytics to see how the site is used. Choose Allow or Decline; the bar stays until you do. Nothing that identifies you is sent either way — we never give Google your name or email address — and Analytics cookies are set only if you choose Allow. Until you choose, or if you decline, your browser may still send Google basic signals without cookies, which are used only to estimate overall visits.
Your choice is remembered in your browser. To change it, use Analytics choices at the bottom of any page. The bar and the link do not appear while you're building a hike, in your settings or on the sign-in pages.
Separately, we count visits to each hike in total, without recording who visited. A hike's maintainers see those totals by month; they never see who the visitors were.
When something on the site breaks, a technical report about the error is sent to a service that helps us find and fix problems. Reports describe what went wrong in the site's code. They don't use cookies, and we never include your name, email address or anything you type, or keep your IP address.
Your language choice, units (miles or kilometers), light/dark preference, and how you like dates written (from your profile settings) are yours and are not shared.
Trail mode can show where you are on the map. That happens in your browser, your browser asks permission first, and that position is not sent to us.
Recording a historic marker you found is different: it sends us where the marker is. When you add a marker, that is your phone's location, which you must allow for adding a marker to work, and where you moved the pin, a short way from it. In trail mode, it is your location when you tap Found a marker?, or the stop you were at. It is sent when the "Is it one of these?" list loads, so we can look for markers other members already recorded nearby, and it is stored only when you save the marker. We keep it private, with your find: only you and site administrators can see it.
The photos of a marker can carry where and when they were taken, if your phone's camera adds that. We read it from the photos you send and keep it with your find for site administrators only, so they can check that a find's photos were taken where it was recorded. It is never shown to anyone else. See Finding markers.
A marker saved on your phone without a signal keeps its position, photos and words in your browser's storage on that phone until it is sent. They are cleared from the phone if you sign out, your session ends or someone else signs in.
You can delete your account from settings. Your account and your content are kept, not erased — deleting is recoverable. You won't be able to sign in while the account is deleted, and it disappears from public pages, but nothing is thrown away unless you ask. To have your account and its content permanently erased instead, use the contact form.
Hikes you created keep your name as their creator, because that credit is part of the record; maintainership passes on so the hike does not become orphaned.
Photos you upload to hikes and waypoints stop being shown on a hike the moment that hike is unpublished or taken down. A photo removed from a hike, or on a waypoint that's deleted, stops being shown when the hike is next published. Unpublishing a hike and later republishing it brings its photos back. A photo taken off a hike isn't deleted: it's kept with your account, and site administrators can add it to a hike or delete it. You'll find it under Your photos when you add a photo to a hike, where you can use it again or delete it. See Photos and licensing.
Closing your account takes down the photos on any hike you still maintain and your marker finds, for good — even if someone else publishes that hike again afterward. Photos on a hike you've handed to another maintainer stay with that hike, the same as the rest of its content — see Maintaining a hike. The files themselves are retained unless you ask us to delete them; anyone can use the contact form to request that a photo come down.