Private by design

Who we are

inRoads (“the app”, “we”) is a group-ride companion for motorcyclists and other travellers. This policy explains what data the app handles, why, and for how long. It applies to the inRoads apps on iPhone and Android and to this website, goinroads.app.

No account required

inRoads doesn’t ask you to create an account. When you first open the app, it signs in anonymously so your device can talk to our backend securely — there’s no email, phone number, name, or password involved, and this anonymous identity isn’t a profile of you.

You choose a display name for a ride so your friends can tell who’s who on the map. That name lives only with that ride and goes away when the ride does.

Location — the heart of it

inRoads needs your location to do its job: show you and your group on a live map, draw the route to a shared destination, and detect a possible crash. Here’s exactly how that works:

• Shared only during an active ride. Your live location is broadcast to the other riders in your group only while a ride is running. Start a ride and it flows; end or leave the ride and it stops.
• Shared with your group. Location is visible to the riders who joined the same ride via its invite link. inRoads doesn’t publish your location publicly, and never sells it. The one exception is a follow link you choose to send — see Sharing a trip with family below.
• Held transiently. Live positions are relayed through a secure real-time database (Google Firebase) so the group map stays current, and are cleared when the ride ends.
• Route & navigation. To draw the route and estimate arrival we send the start and destination to a mapping provider. Turn-by-turn itself happens in whatever navigation app you choose to open (Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze). Your destination is your business; we don’t build an ad profile from it.
• Background location. If you allow it, inRoads can keep sharing your position with the group while the app is in the background during a ride, so you don’t drop off the map at a stoplight. You control this in your device settings.

Sharing a trip with family

inRoads has an optional Family Follow feature. During a ride you can send someone — say a partner at home — a read-only follow link so they can watch the trip on the live map without creating an account or joining the group.

• A follower sees the group on the map, but sees the other riders only as anonymous coloured dots — your fellow riders’ names aren’t exposed to them.
• Following is read-only: a follower can never send pings, join the ride, or affect it in any way.
• You can stop sharing at any time, which cuts the follower off immediately, and the link expires automatically when the ride ends.
• If you never send a follow link, nothing is shared outside your group.

Crash detection & SOS

If enabled, inRoads uses your device’s motion and location sensors to detect the sudden stop that can indicate a crash. When it does, it starts a countdown you can cancel. If you don’t cancel, the app alerts the other riders in your group and shares your current location so they can reach you. This processing happens on your device; an alert is only sent to your group, and only when a possible crash isn’t cancelled.

Emergency Card

You can optionally fill in an Emergency Card — medical notes (such as blood group or allergies) and an emergency contact — so the people riding with you know what to do if something goes wrong. This information is stored on your device, not on our servers. It is revealed to the other riders in your group only during an active SOS or an uncancelled crash alert, and only for as long as that alert is live; when the alert clears, it’s no longer shown. If you never raise an alert, it’s never shared, and if you leave it blank the feature simply does nothing.

Weather

If you turn on weather awareness, the app sends the ride’s approximate coordinates to our weather service to fetch the local forecast so it can warn the group about rain ahead. The coordinates are used for that lookup and not retained as a history of where you’ve been.

What we store, and for how long

• Active-ride data (positions, pings, proposals, ride recap) lives only for the duration of the ride and a short window after, then is purged automatically. inRoads is designed to forget.
• No long-term history. We don’t keep a permanent log of your rides or routes on our servers. A recap you choose to share is a snapshot you control.
• On your device. Your preferences (like your theme and feature choices) are stored locally on your device, not on our servers.

Service providers

To run inRoads we rely on a small number of infrastructure providers who process data on our behalf:

• Google Firebase — anonymous authentication, the real-time database that relays the live group map during a ride, and abuse protection (App Check).
• Mapping & navigation provider — to display maps and compute routes.
• Weather provider — to fetch forecasts when weather awareness is on.

These providers process data only to deliver the app’s features. We don’t use advertising SDKs and we don’t sell your data.

Abuse protection

inRoads uses Firebase App Check to verify that requests to our backend come from a genuine copy of the app, which helps protect the service from abuse. This checks the app, not you.

Children

inRoads is not directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them.

Your choices

• Leave any ride at any time to stop sharing your location with that group.
• Control location and background-location permissions in your device settings.
• Turn off optional features (like weather awareness or crash detection) in the app.
• Delete the app to remove locally stored preferences from your device.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to how inRoads handles data, we’ll update this page and change the “last updated” date above.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email us at goinroads@gmail.com.