Location is the most personal data there is
A few weeks of trips are enough to work out where you sleep, where you work, where your children go to school, which clinic you visit and where you pray. Researchers have shown that four points of place and time are enough to pick out almost anyone in a large set of phone records, with no name attached.
What many apps keep
Many navigation apps keep your location history on their servers, tie it to your account and use it for ads or to improve their maps. Some of that is genuinely useful. All of it is a record that can be leaked, misused or demanded by someone else.
How Bound avoids it
- No account. There is no name or email to tie your trips to.
- Your history stays on your phone. Saved places, recent searches and the trip diary are stored on the phone only. Delete the app and they are gone.
- Only what one request needs. To plan a route, our gateway needs where you’re starting and where you’re going. It passes them to the routing service and keeps nothing.
- Logs without places. Our logs record that a request happened, never coordinates, addresses or what you searched for.
- Sharing is your choice. A place you add reaches Bound only when you send it, and goes to OpenStreetMap only if you turn that on.
The trade-off
Nothing syncs between phones. Lose your phone and your saved places go with it. We think that’s the right trade for a map app, and we explain the cost of each of our choices in the open.
The details
The privacy policy lists every piece of data that leaves your phone, who receives it, where and why.