Privacy Policy

• We store your email address, the tours and routes you import or record, and the little you choose to put in your profile.
• Your tours are private. Nobody sees them unless you add that person to a tour as a participant.
• We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not track you across other websites.
• You can delete your account, and everything in it, at any time — from your profile on the website, or from Settings in the mobile app.

Kontekst Software UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Maria-Theresia-Allee 19, 52064 Aachen, Germany
Email: info@kontekst.app

Full company details are in our imprint. For anything about your data, write to the address above.

Your email address. Signing in works without a password: we email you a link or a one-time code. We need your address to let you in, to tell you when something happens in your archive, and to recognise you when someone adds you to a tour. Legal basis: performance of a contract, Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Your tours and tracks. This is location data: the route itself, with timestamps and whatever your device or watch recorded along it, such as elevation, speed, temperature, power, heart rate, or cadence, plus the tour's name, dates, and activity type. It comes either from GPX files you import or from a recording made in the Pedaltales app. It is the service: without it there is no archive and no map. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Fitness values inside a route. If the file you import or the device you record with carries heart rate or cadence, we store those values alongside the route, because they are part of the recording. Heart rate can say something about your health, so we keep it for no other purpose and process it on the basis of your consent, given when you import or record a file that contains it (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR). Delete the tour and the values go with it.

Background location on mobile. If you let the app record in the background, it keeps reading your position while a recording is running, so the route does not break when your phone is in a pocket. It records only while you have started a recording, and you can stop it at any time or withdraw the permission in your system settings. The route is kept on your device and uploaded to your archive when you are signed in. Legal basis: your consent, given through the operating system's permission prompt, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, together with Art. 6(1)(b).

Your profile. A display name, a short bio, a home base, your preferred units, and a default activity type — all optional, all yours to change or empty. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Participants and friends. When you record who was on a tour with you, you give us their email address, and we email them that the tour is now in their archive too. The same goes for a friend request. We use those addresses only to deliver the notification and to connect the tour to that person's account when they sign in. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — our and your legitimate interest in letting the people who were there keep the memory. Please add only people you actually went out with.

Notifications. Friend requests, acceptances, participations, and tour handovers appear in your in-app inbox and are emailed to you. These are service messages about your own archive, not marketing. We send no newsletter.

Technical data. Our servers log the usual request data — IP address, time, the page or endpoint requested, browser and operating system — to keep the service running and secure. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Logs are kept short-term and then deleted.

We keep the list of third parties as short as we can. Each one processes data on our behalf under Art. 28 GDPR, or receives only what it technically needs to answer a request.

• Our hosting provider runs the servers and the database that hold your account and your tours, in the European Union.
• Our email provider delivers sign-in links, codes, and notification emails. It sees the recipient address and the content of the message.
• OpenFreeMap serves the map tiles and fonts the map is drawn with. Your browser or app fetches them directly, so OpenFreeMap sees your IP address and which part of the world you are looking at. It does not receive your tours: those are drawn on top, on your device. Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors.
• Our own analytics. We count page views with Umami, which we host ourselves at analytics.kontekst.app. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses, and builds no profile across sites or across visits. It records which page was opened, not what is on it: your tours never reach it.

We use no advertising or tracking cookies, so there is no consent banner to click away. The app keeps your session token and your light-or-dark preference in your browser's local storage, and the mobile app keeps the session token in the device keystore (Keychain on iOS, Keystore on Android) and your recorded tours in a database on the device. All of it is needed for the app to work.

Your account and your tours stay until you delete them — an archive whose contents expire would be no archive. Delete a tour and it is gone; delete your account and we delete your profile, your tours and tracks, your friendships, and your notifications.

Two exceptions, both your choice. If you are a participant on someone else's tour, deleting your account removes you from it but does not delete their tour. And when you delete your account, you can hand individual tours over to a participant instead of deleting them; only the tours you explicitly choose are transferred, and everything else goes. Server logs and backups age out on their own within a short, technically necessary period.

Under the GDPR you have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20), and objection to processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 21). Where processing rests on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time with effect for the future.

Most of this you can do yourself on the website: edit or empty your profile, delete a tour, or delete your account. The mobile app can delete your account too, under Settings; it deletes everything, so if you want to hand a tour to someone who was there instead, do that on the website first. The mobile app exports a recorded tour as a GPX file; for a copy of anything else, ask us. For the rest, write to info@kontekst.app and we will answer within a month. You may also complain to a data protection supervisory authority — for us that is the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Sign-in uses one-time links and codes rather than passwords, and tokens can be revoked. Access to production data is limited to the people who operate the service.

Pedaltales is not aimed at children under 16. If you are under 16, please use it only with your parent's or guardian's consent.

If you install the Pedaltales app from the App Store or Google Play, that store processes your download and any purchase under its own privacy policy, as its own controller. We receive no personal data from the store beyond aggregate statistics.

When the product changes, this page changes with it. The date at the top tells you when it last did. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you in the app or by email.