Privacy
Jerv records where you have travelled under your own power and uncovers a map as you go. That is location history, which is the most sensitive kind of consumer data there is. This page describes what the app actually does with it, and where the limits of that are.
Everything starts on your device, and most of it stays there
You can install Jerv, record trips and fill in your map without an account and without anything leaving your phone. There is no automatic upload and no background sync.
Data leaves your device only when you have created an account and chosen to sync. Both are deliberate acts.
What is sent when you sync
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | It is your account. Nothing else reads it — no newsletter, no marketing. |
| The map you have uncovered | The squares of the world you have travelled through, so your map survives a lost phone and so leaderboards and territory can be worked out. Minus anything inside a privacy zone — see below. |
| A reduced version of each trip’s path | Anti‑cheat. A game with territory in it dies if people drive it, so a coarse path is checked server‑side for things a bike cannot do. It is visible only to you. |
| Trip distance, duration, mode, and start and end times | Stats, streaks and scoring. |
| How your phone classified the movement | iOS reports whether it thinks you were walking, cycling, still or in a vehicle. Used only for anti‑cheat. |
| Your chosen handle | What other people see on a leaderboard, if you use one. |
What is never collected
No contacts, no photos, no health or fitness records, no browsing history, no advertising identifiers, no device fingerprinting, no crash or analytics SDK of any kind. Jerv does not track you across other apps or websites, and there is no third-party analytics anywhere in it. Nothing about you is sold or shared with advertisers — there are no advertisers.
One thing sits outside that, and it is not ours: TestFlight. While Jerv for iPhone is in beta it is installed through Apple's TestFlight, and Apple collects things there that it does not collect for an App Store install — crash logs from beta builds, and anything you send with Send Beta Feedback, which includes the screenshot you chose along with your device and iOS version. Apple shows those to us. That is Apple's tooling around the app, under Apple's privacy policy rather than this one, and it changes nothing above: there is still no crash or analytics SDK inside Jerv, and nothing Apple sends us is joined to your account, your trips, or anywhere you have been. It ends when the app leaves beta.
Privacy zones
A privacy zone is a circle you place — typically over your home or workplace — that is cut out of everything that leaves your phone. A zone is applied to:
- the map you sync — squares inside a zone are not uploaded, and a square that a zone merely clips is withheld whole;
- the reduced path uploaded for anti-cheat;
- trails shared with friends;
- images you export or share;
- first-footer claims, which are the one thing here that becomes public.
Zones are applied at the moment something is sent, not when it was recorded, so a zone you add today also covers trips you took last month and have not synced yet. A zone does not hide anything on your own map — it is your map, and you should see all of it.
One limit worth knowing: a zone cannot reach back for data that was already uploaded before you drew it. If you sync a trip and then place a zone over part of it, the squares already on the server stay there until you delete your account. Placing zones before you first sync is the way to be sure.
Trails shared with friends
Sharing recent trails is off by default. When you turn it on, what friends see is a coarsened path — not the precise one — with your privacy zones removed at the moment it is published, and it expires automatically after 14 days. Turning sharing off deletes the trails that have already been published, immediately.
The path kept for anti-cheat is a different, more detailed one, and it is never published — not to friends, not on a leaderboard, not in any aggregate. It exists to catch cheating and that is all it does.
Who can see what
Your account’s data is private by default and is enforced at the database level, not by the app being polite about it: your map, your trips and your paths are readable only by you. What is public is limited to leaderboard scores, handles, club listings and the current season — names and numbers, not locations.
Getting your data out, and deleting it
Both are in the app, under Sync → Your data. Export gives you everything held about your account in a machine-readable file. Delete removes your account and everything attached to it from the server — trips, paths, map, scores, memberships — and it is not recoverable.
Deleting your account deliberately leaves the map on your phone alone. Jerv works with no account at all, and losing years of your own map as the price of leaving a server would be the wrong trade. If you want the local copy gone too, delete the app.
Where it is kept
On a server operated by us in the United States, reached over HTTPS. Jerv does not use a third-party analytics, advertising or data-broker service, so there is no list of processors here — the list is empty.
If you buy a subscription, Apple processes the payment. Jerv never sees your card details and is told only whether a purchase is active.
Analytics on this website
The pages at jerv.app count visits, and it is worth being exact about how, because the paragraphs above make a strong claim and this is the one place that could quietly undermine it.
The counter is Umami, running on the same machine as
everything else described here. It is served from
jerv.app/stats/ — the same origin as the page — so
your browser makes no request to any other company, and none of this data
leaves our server. There are no cookies, nothing is stored
on your device, and there is therefore no consent banner to click. If your
browser sends a Do Not Track signal, nothing is recorded at all.
What is kept is the page URL, the referring site, and the coarse things a browser announces to every website it visits — country, browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language — plus a hash, rotated daily, that tells one visit apart from another without identifying anyone. Your IP address is used to compute that hash and to derive the country, and is not stored.
This is a website measurement, and it is separate from the app. The statement above stands unchanged: there is no analytics or crash SDK of any kind inside Jerv itself, and nothing here is ever joined to an account, a ride, or anywhere you have been. This page and the support page run no script whatsoever and are not counted.
Children
Jerv is not directed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the date at the top changes and the app will say so before the change takes effect.
Contact
support@jerv.app — including for any request to access, correct or delete your data.