Your record. Your choices.

This Privacy Policy applies to the Trace iPhone application, Trace account services, public Trace sharing pages, and the Vex website pages that link to it. “Trace,” “Vex,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to Vex Technologies Inc., a New York corporation.

This Policy applies wherever you use Trace, and section 11 explains the rights that depend on where you live. It describes the current release and the connected services configured for it. It does not apply to a third-party service you visit or use under that provider's own terms and privacy notice.

Questions and privacy requests may be sent to support@builtbyvex.com.

Trace saves your 18-or-older confirmation and the applicable policy version with a server timestamp; it does not ask for a date of birth for this confirmation.

Trace receives information directly from you, from your iPhone and permissions, from Apple or Google when you sign in with them, from Apple when you purchase or manage a subscription, directly or through RevenueCat, from people who interact with you in Trace, and from the providers listed below.

Manual recording uses precise location and motion while a drive is active. If you enable automatic recording and grant the required permissions, Trace may use precise location in the background, including while the screen is locked or another app is open, and Motion & Fitness signals to distinguish vehicle travel from walking or stationary time.

The automatic-recording preference may appear enabled for a new account, but monitoring does not begin until you grant Always and Precise Location, Motion & Fitness, and the required device authorization. You can turn automatic recording off in Trace or change permissions in iOS Settings. Force-quitting Trace and iOS background limits can prevent recording.

Exact routes can be stored on your device and privately in your verified account. They are not made public merely because a drive was recorded. Live drive sharing, described in section 08, starts on for new accounts; it sends your position only to the friends and clubs it allows, only while you record or navigate a drive, and you can turn it off at any time. GPS, motion, elevation, distance, speed, and derived performance values are estimates and may be delayed, incomplete, or wrong.

• Verified account required. Trace uses Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google, or an email address and password. An email account works only after you enter the code we send to confirm the address, and we send a code again if you reset your password. Trace does not provide a guest account.
• Local first. Active and completed drive records, Garage information, selected media, and settings can be stored in an account-scoped area on your iPhone. Drives and Garage changes save there first, then sync to your account when a connection is available.
• Private account persistence. Eligible completed drives, routes, metrics, vehicle records, Garage history, private ownership fields, and selected sanitized media may be stored with Supabase so the verified owner can recover them. This is a standard account feature, not a Trace Pro benefit.
• Plan limits do not delete history. A plan can limit which drives you can open, not what Trace keeps. Older drives stay saved in your account, and export and deletion are account rights, not Trace Pro benefits.
• Detailed drives and raw routes are private. Recording does not publish the detailed record or route. A drive appears in your friends' activity feed only when you share it with them from the drive page.
• Live drives with friends begin on for new accounts. Trace no longer asks first; turn them off anytime in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data. Each club is a separate choice and begins off. An account created before this version keeps its earlier choice.
• Profile and aggregate Stats. New profiles and aggregate Stats can begin visible to other Trace users. You can change them to Private in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data.
• Garage build visibility. A newly created vehicle can begin with Public selected in the vehicle editor. Review the visibility before saving. Private odometer, notes, routes, raw photos, maintenance, and modification history are not part of the current public-card payload. A build page, described in section 08, adds the mods you list and outlines of drives you shared.
• Heatmap contribution and product analytics begin on for new accounts. Global and friends heatmap contribution begins on everywhere, the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland included; turn it off anytime in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Heatmaps. Product analytics, which includes Trace's internal research on drive summaries, begins on except in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, where it begins off and the permissions page asks once. Change it anytime in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data. An account created before this version keeps its earlier choices. Trace goes by your App Store country or region, or by your iPhone's region when that isn't available, and asks whenever it can't tell.
• No Mapbox telemetry. Trace turns off Mapbox's telemetry on every iPhone, so there is no Mapbox sharing switch. Necessary map requests still occur when you use maps, as section 07 describes.

Global heatmap addendum, effective October 5, 2026 (heatmap-global-permanent-v3). The global heatmap is aggregated, de-identified data: it lights coarse hexagonal areas, about 0.7 km² each, in one of four brightness levels, blended from the drives of many drivers. It shows no names, usernames, photos, vehicles, speeds, dates, times, counts, or single routes. Contributed history has no age-based expiry. Global enrollment from before that date was reset rather than carried into it. From version 5, a new account's global contribution begins on under this addendum everywhere, and you can turn it off at any time; an account created before version 5 keeps its choice. Friends heatmap sharing remains a separate choice under its existing rules.

Private drive recording works with global heatmap contribution off. While global contribution is on, Trace leaves out drives you keep private (recorded in Ghost mode or marked Keep this drive private), deleted drives, passenger and other trips that aren't drives, trips excluded from your stats, imported trips, and trips replaced by a correction. It also leaves out every area inside or touching your privacy zones and every area within about 500 meters of where a drive started or ended, which in practice is about 1 km around each end, and Trace's servers check each contribution against your saved drive before it counts. From the rest it removes at least the first and last 60 seconds and 500 meters along the route. It also excludes cells that touch the 500-meter departure or destination privacy areas, including when the route returns to those areas. Trace converts the remaining path into H3 resolution-8 route cells on your device before submission. The private contribution remains associated with your Trace account and is privacy-reduced, not guaranteed anonymous.

A cell is eligible for the public global heatmap only after at least 24 hours from submission and only once at least three different drivers drove through it on the same day; each area then appears once, without a date, at the brightest level it reached. Only signed-in members who accepted the current terms can view the map. Public output omits account identity, raw coordinates, raw routes, exact contributor count, vehicle identity, and speed. Trace retains private account-linked coarse cell contributions, receipt timestamps, and idempotency records so it can remove your contributions later; the global contribution payload does not contain raw route coordinates. Eligible public cells and these private receipts do not expire merely because they are old.

You can turn global contribution off in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Heatmaps. Turning it off deletes your retained global contributions at once and takes the areas they touched off the map; those areas are rebuilt from the remaining drivers within about a minute, and an area left with fewer than three drivers stays off. Keeping a drive private, deleting or correcting it, changing your privacy zones, or resetting your heatmap also removes its contribution. Turning contribution back on adds only drives you upload from then on. Contribution deletion and account deletion also retract the affected history. Changing global contribution does not change your friends heatmap choice. Trace's viewer cache uses a short server lease capped at 60 seconds; permanent storage does not grant indefinite access to a withdrawn contribution through Trace. Trace cannot recall a screenshot or external copy already created.

Friends heatmap contribution is a separate choice in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Heatmaps, and it begins the same way as global contribution. Only routes you include when you share a drive with selected friends add coarse areas, with start and finish areas hidden. An area appears after 24 hours and only where at least two friends contribute, and contributions expire after 30 days.

• authenticate the correct account, including sending email confirmation and password-reset codes, and keep account data separated;
• record, recover, finalize, map, organize, and privately preserve drives and Garage records;
• apply privacy, sharing, social, safety, notification, and subscription choices;
• provide friends, clubs, meetups, group drives, leaderboards, reports, blocks, referrals, public cards, live drives, and selected share features;
• send the notifications you allow, such as friend requests, accepted requests, and meetup invitations;
• check public text automatically before others see it, and send photos and flagged text to a person for review;
• keep the Business or Personal tags you add and build a mileage log when you ask for one;
• process heatmap contributions and product analytics (which includes internal research on drive summaries) while they are on;
• present and verify purchases and entitlements when Trace Pro is offered, choose which plans the Pro screen lists, and keep subscription records;
• produce a requested account export or deletion workflow;
• prevent fraud, abuse, unsafe use, and security incidents; comply with law; and enforce our terms; and
• answer support, privacy, safety, and website inquiries.

Trace does not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, display targeted advertising, or use identified drive, location, or vehicle records to train a general-purpose artificial-intelligence model.

Product analytics and internal research. Product analytics is on by default for new accounts, except in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, where it begins off until you turn it on; you can change it in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data. While it is on, Trace sends the allow-listed usage events described in section 07 to Mixpanel and uses summaries of your new drives, under a research ID, for its internal evaluation of driving analysis and recording quality. The summaries omit your name, photos, and exact route but stay privately linked to your account. This version makes no AI model calls, trains no models, and shares no research with outside organizations. Turning it off stops new sharing on your iPhone at once and, once the change syncs, invalidates research downloads and queues their deletion. Copies already downloaded for authorized internal use cannot be recalled remotely, and turning it off does not remove your drive history.

Operational clarification, October 5, 2026. Build 24 uses Trace-owned paywalls and Apple StoreKit; it does not initialize the Superwall SDK or send account identity or plan attributes to Superwall. Trace retired server forwarding to Superwall on October 3, 2026. Older installed builds may retain their original SDK behavior. Historical provider records require separate erasure confirmation; removing the integration is not confirmation that those records were deleted. Contact support@builtbyvex.com for a request concerning historical processing.

RevenueCat. Trace's own Pro screens use RevenueCat as a subscription back office. Trace still makes every purchase with Apple StoreKit and still decides Pro access from Apple-signed records bound to your account; an update from RevenueCat only tells Trace which subscription to check again with Apple. If Trace's server cannot be reached, the app may show Pro on your iPhone for up to 24 hours from RevenueCat's last signed record of your Apple purchase; cloud sync and other server features still wait for Trace's own check. RevenueCat identifies you by your Trace account ID, which is also the identifier Apple carries on every Trace purchase. The SDK runs with attribution identifiers and SDK diagnostics off, no customer attributes are set, and no RevenueCat integration such as an analytics or advertising network is connected. RevenueCat's offerings and offer tests choose which Trace Pro plans the Pro screen lists, their order, and the plan selected first; they cannot change the product you buy, and Apple's purchase sheet shows its price and terms.

Settings › About › Acknowledgements lists the open-source software, fonts and data sources Trace is built with, and their licenses. The list is part of the app and loads without contacting anyone. If you tap a source, it opens that organization's website in your browser, under that site's own practices.

Providers may process information under our instructions and their own security and legal obligations. Independent destinations you choose—such as a social network, messaging app, or a person who receives a share—operate under their own practices.

Where your information is processed. Vex is based in the United States, and Trace's account database and private storage are hosted with Supabase in the United States. When you use Trace from another country, your information is sent to and processed in the United States, and the providers above may also process it in other countries where they operate. Privacy law in those countries may differ from the law where you live. Where your country's law requires a safeguard for these transfers, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, with the additions the United Kingdom and Switzerland require, as included in our providers' data processing terms, or on another transfer basis your country's law recognizes. Vex is not certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. You can ask support@builtbyvex.com for a copy of these safeguards.

Trace may show your profile and aggregate Stats according to your selected visibility. Aggregate Stats include your drive count, distance, driving time, longest drive, how many days you drove this week, month or year, and when your last drive ended. New Stats can begin visible to every Trace user; you can make them Private in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data. Your friends' activity feed shows a drive only when you share it with them from the drive page with Share with friends, which names the friends who may see it; the share ends after 30 days or when you stop sharing it. It can include completion time, distance, duration, the shared route with its start and end areas removed, and an available public vehicle summary. Drives you don't share stay out of the feed, and the detailed drive and raw route remain private.

Compare Stats. An accepted, unblocked friend who can see your Stats can compare them with their own. Compare Stats shows that friend your figures for the chosen period, including your top and average speeds, 0–60 time, peak g-force, braking and launch counts, a chart of the speeds you drove at, your longest drive and day records, and your driving days for the last 26 weeks with each day's drive count and distance. Trace's servers return these figures only to you and your friends.

Ghost mode. You can turn on Ghost mode in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data, or from the navigation menu while you follow directions. While it is on, drives you record stay in your own history and private account storage, but Trace keeps them out of what other people can see: your friends' activity feed, your shared profile and Garage statistics, public vehicle-card statistics, peer calendars and leaderboards. A drive that overlaps any time Ghost mode was on is treated this way, even if it syncs later. Trace stores when Ghost mode was on and off on your iPhone, and marks each affected drive as hidden from friends when it syncs. You can also keep a single drive private with Keep this drive private on its Share with friends card. A drive recorded in Ghost mode starts that way, and you can make it visible again. A private drive is left out of the global heatmap, friends' heat, the friends' feed, leaderboards, and shared stats, and an active share of it stops; it stays in your own history, Stats, and My Roads. Ghost mode does not change a route you deliberately share, or a share card or film you export.

Live drives with friends and clubs. You can let friends, and members of clubs you choose, see you while you drive. For a new account it is on from the start, and Trace no longer asks first; you can turn it off at any time in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data, and an account created before this version keeps its earlier choice. Sharing with friends never turns on sharing with a club; each club is a separate choice, made on the club's screen or in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Club live drives, and Trace reminds you that club members may not be your friends. While you record or navigate a drive with sharing on, Trace sends your position about every 8 seconds while moving (about every 30 seconds when slow), with a short trail of the positions in between. The people you share with see your name, your 3D vehicle, your position and direction, that short trail and, while you navigate, the route ahead and your arrival time. They don't see your speed, except in a group drive, as described below. Friends can also see your live drive in CarPlay; club members who are not your friends cannot.

Who can see a live drive: the friends you had accepted when the drive started (not anyone you add during it), and members of each club you chose who had joined that club before the drive started, as long as you both still belong to it. People you have blocked, or who have blocked you, never see it. Unfriending, blocking, leaving a club, being removed from it, turning a club off or the club being deleted ends what that person or club can see straight away.

What a live drive never shares: anything while Ghost mode is on (turning it on stops sharing at once); positions within your privacy zones and 200 meters around them; within 400 meters of the Home and Work places you saved, of places where your recent drives often start or end, of where this drive started, and of a navigation destination other than a meetup (the shared route stops short of it too); and anything while the drive is paused or after about two minutes parked. Trace's servers also refuse any position, trail point or route segment inside a privacy zone. Sharing stops when the drive ends, when you sign out, when you turn it off or when you save a new privacy zone.

Privacy zones. You can add privacy zones in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Privacy zones. Trace also suggests zones for your home and for places you often visit, worked out on your iPhone from the drives you recorded in the last 180 days: home is where your drives most often end for the night, and a frequent place is one your drives ended at on at least three different days. A suggestion leaves your iPhone only if you add it. Places you dismiss stay on your iPhone so they are not suggested again.

Saved places. Home, Work and the other places you name are saved with your account, so they appear in Search and in CarPlay; you can rename, move or delete them in Settings › Saved Places. Opening directions to a place adds it to your recent destinations. Search also shows the home Trace detects from your drives, using the same detection on your iPhone as privacy zone suggestions. That home stays on your iPhone and joins your saved places only if you save, rename or move it; if you delete it, Trace does not show it again.

Group drives. When you take directions to a meetup, Trace shows a group drive: everyone in the meetup who shares a live drive with you appears on your map with their approved photo or initials, their name, their route to the meetup, and a status such as “On my way,” “5 min away,” or “Arrived.” While you navigate to a meetup you take part in, your accepted friends in that meetup (its host and the people going) also see your current speed as a ring around your photo; club members who are not your friends, friends outside the meetup, and people who declined never see it, and it is deleted with your live position. Arrived friends are drawn in rings around the meetup pin, not at their real parking spot. When a participant who is navigating to the meetup with sharing on comes within 150 meters of it, Trace's servers record when they arrived and the 3D vehicle they arrived in. That record is shown only to that person and their accepted friends in the meetup, for six hours, and it never includes a position or a speed.

Your speed is shared only with friends. Your own Stats, drive pages, and widgets show your speed, 0–60 times, and g-force. Your accepted friends see your speed figures in Compare Stats and your current speed on the group-drive ring, as described above. Nobody else sees them: not people who are not your friends, leaderboard viewers, or visitors to a public vehicle card. A share card you choose to export can include your own figures, and its recipients see what you send. While product analytics is on, Trace's own team also sees them in the research summaries described in section 06.

Notifications. If you allow notifications, Trace registers your device's push token with its servers and Apple's push service. Trace notifies you when someone sends you a friend request, accepts yours, or invites you to a meetup. It never notifies anyone else when you start driving, and no friend or meetup notification carries a location, speed, or driving state. Notifications about your own drives, such as a drive's Live Activity starting, go only to your iPhone. A notification shows a person's name or a meetup title only after it has been approved; otherwise it uses a generic line. You can turn off friend requests or meetup invitations in Settings › Notifications › Friends. Signing out removes the device's registration. Trace also uses a push token to start a drive's Live Activity when a drive begins in the background.

Contact discovery is optional and begins off. When you tap the contact-discovery action, Trace enables your own account for reciprocal matching, requests Contacts access, reads only email addresses and phone numbers, normalizes and hashes them on the device, uploads the hashes in batches of up to 200 to look for matches, and clears the raw working values. Trace does not keep your contacts' hashes; it records only how many were checked and when. To make you findable, Trace stores a hash of the email address you sign in with. That hash is pseudonymous and linked to your account, and it is deleted when you turn discovery off. If permission or matching fails after discoverability was enabled, it can remain enabled. To turn it off, open Social, tap Add friends (or open Settings › Find Contacts), and tap “Turn off contact discovery” to request that reciprocal matching be disabled. This is separate from the iOS Contacts permission. If the request fails, retry when connected or contact support@builtbyvex.com; a failed request is not confirmation that discovery is off.

Leaderboards begin off. Joining activates supported Friends and World scopes and future qualifying evidence for current metrics such as longest drive and most drives. Territory is a separate opt-in that uses future verified drives, removes endpoint areas, and publishes coarse monthly tiles under your leaderboard alias. Leaving removes participation and owned tiles. No leaderboard ranks speed. Invite-only Clubs show member usernames and display names to other members; optional Club Garage sharing exposes all of your active public build cards to that club until you turn it off or leave.

Saving a vehicle with Public visibility can create or update a revocable public card at an opaque link. The current public card can include your display name or username, unit preference, selected vehicle year, make, model, trim, nickname, color, and verified aggregate drive count and distance. It never includes a measured top speed or 0–60 time. It currently excludes avatar and vehicle photos, modifications, raw routes, exact location, odometer, private notes, maintenance, and private Garage history.

Build pages. With a Public build, Trace can also publish a build page that the people who can see that car in your Garage can open. It shows the car's 3D model, name, configuration and your username; the story, place and social links you add; your miles and drives by month, the date of your first drive, and your badges with the day you earned them; the factory specs and mods you list, with claimed figures only, never a measured speed or 0–60 time; up to 12 drives you shared, as outlines without anything within 500 meters of either end or inside your privacy zones, which Trace's servers check, with their date, distance and duration; and a logbook of those drives and your mods by date, never a time of day. Photos are not published to build pages yet. The text you add is checked like other public text before it appears, and anyone who can see the page can report it with Report Build. Revoking the build's public card deletes the page, and a drive you delete leaves it at once.

New or changed usernames, display names, profile photos, public vehicle details, club names and descriptions, and meetup titles and places are checked before other members, invited friends, or public-card visitors see them. Text is checked automatically when you save it, against lists of slurs and hateful, sexual, threatening, and impersonating terms, and for links and contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers. Text that passes appears right away. Every profile photo, any text the check flags, and content from an account with a recent moderation action, an open report, or a recent flag wait for review by a person. While review is pending, Trace can show a neutral identity or the last approved version. Your original content remains available to you and authorized reviewers. Reviewers can look back at automatic approvals and remove content that should not have passed. We retain the submitted version, the approval or removal decision and whether it was made automatically, and related safety records to operate these controls; operational email alerts contain aggregate queue counts, not the reported content.

Share cards, exported files, route previews, and public-card links can be copied or screenshotted. Revoking access stops future access through Trace where technically available, but it cannot retrieve a copy already held outside Trace.

Share Studio images and videos. Trace renders share images and videos, such as the free Drive replay and Trace Pro's Night route film and other replays, on your iPhone from the drive's route, over a map image of the route's area from Apple Maps, after the same privacy trimming as other route shares: the start and end areas (250 meters by default) and your privacy zones are removed. Videos Trace renders carry no location metadata from the drive. Trace does not upload them; they go only where you send them, to your Photos library (with add-only access) or through the iOS share sheet. Trace's working copies are kept outside your iCloud backup and deleted when you leave Share Studio; a copy left by an interruption is deleted the next time you use Share Studio, or when iOS clears Trace's cache. If you choose Instagram Stories, Trace hands the image or video to the Instagram app on your iPhone through a pasteboard entry that stays on this iPhone and expires after five minutes, and names Trace by its Meta app ID; Trace contains no Facebook or Meta software. A recipient or platform you share with handles what you send under its own practices.

Widgets. Trace's Home Screen, Lock Screen, and StandBy widgets show your own figures, meetups, and car pictures. Trace keeps what they show on your iPhone, in storage only Trace and its widgets can read, and uploads nothing for them. When you choose a car picture for a widget, Trace can separate the car from its background and center it, on your iPhone.

Business mileage. If you turn on Track business miles in Settings › Mileage Tracking, you can tag drives as Business or Personal. A tag syncs privately with your account so it reaches your other devices; friends, clubs, leaderboards, and the research summaries never see it. The mileage log (CSV or PDF) and the estimated deduction are built on your iPhone from your saved drives. The log goes only where you send it, and Trace's working copy is removed after sharing. The estimate uses the IRS standard mileage rate, appears only in the United States, and is not tax advice.

Referrals. Your invite code is linked to your account. When someone enters or confirms your code, Trace records that you invited them and when, whether the referral counted toward a reward and, if not, why, and the weeks of Trace Pro it earned. The person who invited you sees only how many invited friends have joined, not which ones. To prevent self-referrals, Trace checks whether the new account has used the same Trace installation or notification token as the inviter's account. A code you open but have not confirmed is kept with your account for up to 30 days.

We may disclose information when required by valid law, to protect people or the service, in a corporate transaction with appropriate safeguards, or with your direction or consent.

Backups roll off on our hosting provider's schedule, so deleted data can remain in a backup for a while after it is deleted from active systems. We use retention criteria that consider the feature requested, account status, user choice, security and fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and legal or accounting obligations.

• change profile and aggregate Stats visibility;
• turn on Ghost mode to keep drives you record out of what friends and other drivers can see, without stopping recording;
• turn live drive sharing with friends on or off in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data, and choose each club separately on the club's screen or in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Club live drives;
• hide other people's live drives from your own map in Map Layers › More layers › Friends › Live drives;
• keep detailed drives and raw routes private, and share a drive with the friends you choose from its page, or stop sharing it;
• turn heatmap contribution and product analytics (including internal research) on or off at any time in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data, leave contact discovery off, and use “Turn off contact discovery” in Social › Add friends;
• add privacy zones, including the ones Trace suggests, in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Privacy zones;
• rename, move or delete Home, Work and your other saved places, including a home Trace detected, in Settings › Saved Places;
• turn friend-request and meetup notifications on or off in Settings › Notifications › Friends, or turn off notifications for Trace in iOS Settings;
• turn business mileage tracking on or off in Settings › Mileage Tracking, and tag or re-tag drives;
• manage automatic recording and iOS Location, Motion & Fitness, Contacts, Photos, and notification permissions;
• join or leave eligible leaderboards and clubs, revoke a public vehicle card, stop an eligible route share, and block or report accounts;
• request an account export of eligible hosted records and separately preserve local-only records;
• restore a drive or vehicle you deleted in the last 30 days from Recently Deleted, which puts it back on your iPhone and in your Trace account; and
• start account deletion in the app, as described in section 12, or contact support if the control or a processing step is unavailable.

Trace offers these rights to every user, wherever you live and whether or not a particular law applies to Vex:

• Know and access. Ask what personal information we hold about you and receive a copy.
• Correct. Fix inaccurate information in the app where you can edit it, or ask us to correct it.
• Delete. Delete your account and associated information as described in section 12.
• Portability. Export eligible account data in a portable format from Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Export Account Data.
• Withdraw consent. Turn off an optional choice, such as live drive sharing, heatmap contribution, product analytics, or an iOS permission, at any time. This stops future processing for that choice; it does not undo processing that happened before.
• Opt out. Trace does not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, use it for targeted advertising, or use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects, so there is nothing to opt out of today. If that changes, we will ask first or offer an opt-out as the law requires.

Sensitive information. Precise location is sensitive information under several privacy laws. Trace processes it only after you grant location permission, and only to provide the features you use, such as recording, maps, directions, drive titles, live drives and heatmap contribution while they are on, and internal research on drive summaries while product analytics is on. It is not sold, used for advertising, or used to infer other sensitive characteristics. You can withdraw location permission in iOS Settings, which stops the features that need it.

How to make a request. Use the in-app controls where they exist, email support@builtbyvex.com with the subject “Privacy request,” or write to the mailing address in section 15. We verify requests by asking you to confirm control of your Trace account or email address, and we will not ask for more information than we need. An authorized agent may submit a request with your written permission where the law allows; we may still ask you to confirm your identity directly. We respond within one month, or sooner where the law where you live requires it. If a request is complex, we may extend that time where the law allows, and we will tell you why before the first period ends.

Appeals. If we decline a request, we will tell you why. You can ask us to reconsider by replying with the subject “Privacy appeal,” and we will respond within 60 days. You can also complain to an authority, as described below.

No discrimination. We will not deny service, charge a different price, or provide a different quality of service because you exercised a privacy right. Trace does not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes.

United States. Several U.S. states give residents rights over their personal information; the rights above include them. If you disagree with the outcome of an appeal, you may contact your state attorney general.

European Economic Area, United Kingdom, and Switzerland. Vex Technologies Inc. is the controller of your personal data. We use it on these legal bases:

• Contract: to provide your account and the features you ask for, such as recording, sync, Garage, friends, clubs, live drives with friends, the shares you choose, Trace Pro, export, and deletion;
• Consent: for product analytics (including internal research on drive summaries), which begins off in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland until you turn it on, for live drives with a club, contact discovery, and notifications, and for the iOS permissions you grant;
• Legitimate interests: to keep Trace and its community safe and secure, check public content, prevent fraud and abuse, fix problems, answer messages, and build the global heatmap as aggregated, de-identified data and the friends heatmap from routes you share with friends, both of which you can turn off at any time, where your rights do not override those interests; and
• Legal obligation: to keep tax and accounting records, answer lawful requests, and meet other legal duties.

You also have the rights to restrict our processing and to object to processing based on legitimate interests; turning off live drive sharing, heatmap contribution, or product analytics in Settings › Account › Privacy & Data stops that processing. To create an account, you must provide a sign-in identity and confirm that you are 18 or older, and recording needs location; everything else is optional, and leaving it out only turns off the feature that uses it. The automatic text check described in section 08 only lets text appear right away or holds it for a person to review. It never removes content or restricts an account by itself, so Trace makes no decision based solely on automated processing that has legal or similarly significant effects on you. You have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the country where you live or work or where you believe your rights were infringed; in the United Kingdom, that is the Information Commissioner's Office.

Other countries and regions. If you live elsewhere, such as in Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, or Australia, you also have the rights the privacy law where you live gives you. Use the steps above to exercise them; support@builtbyvex.com is Trace's privacy contact for every country. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Current status. Trace includes an account-deletion flow, and the connected cleanup process is designed to remove account data across active Trace systems and applicable providers. Those connected services are in place, and complete deletion is still being tested. A submitted or pending request is not proof of deletion: until successful end-to-end completion is verified, a queued, pending, signed-out, or locally cleared state is not proof that hosted data or provider records have been erased. Rely only on the status shown in Trace or a completion confirmation from support. No completion period is published yet; we will publish one after end-to-end testing is complete.

Before you begin. While safely parked, open Settings › Account › Privacy & Data › Export Account Data and verify the downloaded archive when the export feature is available. The server archive covers enumerated server-held records; it may not contain an active checkpoint, pending media, or another local-only item on this iPhone. Finish, discard, save, or separately preserve local-only work before deletion or uninstalling. Deletion is intended to be irreversible after completion.

Start in Trace.

1. Open Trace and sign in to the account you want to delete.
2. Open Settings with the profile button on the map, then select Delete Account at the bottom of the page. It is also under Account › Details.
3. Select Begin Account Deletion.
4. When asked, confirm it is you by signing in again with the same method you use for Trace: Apple, Google, or your email and password.
5. Read the scope and Apple subscription reminder, then confirm only when ready.

The in-app path is the primary method because it binds the request to the verified account. If you cannot sign in or the control does not work, email support@builtbyvex.com with the subject “Trace account deletion help,” the app version, your sign-in method, and the step that failed. We must verify account ownership before acting on an email request, and an email alone is not proof that deletion occurred. Do not send a password, one-time code, authentication token, full Apple receipt, or raw route.

What completion covers. The completed workflow is designed to remove or de-identify the Trace authentication user, profile, visibility and privacy settings, contact-discovery state and hashes, social relationships, clubs and Territory records, meetups and arrival records, blocks, reports where deletion is lawful, drives and route records, saved places, recent destinations and privacy zones, live drive share records, Garage and vehicle data, hosted media, public vehicle cards, heatmap submissions, referral codes and records, notification devices and queued notifications, research consent and contributions, feature state, provider tokens, eligible analytics identity, and the subscription-processor (RevenueCat) customer record associated with the account. RevenueCat completes its deletion on its own schedule. Local cleanup removes the account namespace, Recently Deleted copies, live drive and research choices, and app-held session or feature state on the participating device. Apple-controlled backups, Keychain behavior, another device, and copies outside Trace can follow separate lifecycles.

What may remain. Vex may retain the minimum records reasonably needed to document and complete the request, prevent fraud and abuse, resolve disputes, protect security, comply with tax or accounting rules, respond to lawful process, and honor a legal hold. Deleted data can also remain for a while in restricted backups, which roll off on our hosting provider's schedule. Public or friend copies, screenshots, exports, files sent through another app, social-network posts, and other material already held by another person are outside Trace and cannot be recalled.

Apple subscriptions. Deleting a Trace account does not cancel an Apple subscription or automatically create a refund. Manage or cancel Trace Pro separately through Apple Subscriptions; Apple handles cancellation and refund requests under its rules.

Pending, failed, and complete. A request may remain pending while active Trace records, private storage, authentication, analytics identity, or provider tokens are processed. A request is complete only after the authoritative workflow reports completion and Trace or support provides a completion confirmation. Contact support@builtbyvex.com for the status of a request, preferably from the address associated with your account.

Trace is not directed to children and does not offer a child or parental-consent account. New and existing members must explicitly confirm that they are 18 or older when accepting the updated agreements; we retain the confirmation and server timestamp, not a date of birth. You must be at least 18 years old to create or use a Trace account. If we learn that a person under 18 provided personal information, we may close the account and delete the information as required by law. A parent or guardian may contact support@builtbyvex.com.

Trace uses measures such as account-scoped local storage, Keychain session storage, encrypted network transport, row-level database rules, private storage authorization, server-side validation, reduced public projections, and purpose-limited provider access. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability or absolute security.

If you believe your account or Trace data is at risk, contact support@builtbyvex.com. Do not email passwords, one-time codes, authentication tokens, complete payment details, or raw route files unless support gives you a secure way to provide specifically requested information.

We update the date and policy version when this Policy changes. For a material change, Trace asks you to review and accept the new version in the app before you continue using account features, and we may also give notice on the website, by email, or through another appropriate channel. Where consent is required for a new purpose, we will request it separately rather than treating continued use as consent. Earlier versions are available on request.

Operator

Vex Technologies Inc.

Formation

New York, United States

Mailing address

5124 Avenue N, Brooklyn, NY 11234, United States

Privacy, security, and rights requests

support@builtbyvex.com, or by mail to the mailing address