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Privacy Policy

Effective 20 October 2026. This policy applies to the Traxl Android app and traxl.in.

Traxl is a location-sharing app for small, trusted groups — a family, a few friends, a travelling crew — that we call a Circle. Because the whole product is about where you are, this policy is deliberately specific about what location data we hold, who sees it, and how you make it stop. Traxl is operated from India by Traxl (“we”, “us”).

1. What we collect

Account

  • Phone number or Google account email — whichever you sign in with. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication (Google); we receive a verified identifier, never your Google password, and we never see the OTP.
  • Date of birth — asked once when you start using the app, only to apply our age rules (section 7). It is never shown to anyone in your Circles.
  • Display name and photo, if you choose to set them. Both are visible to members of your Circles.

Location

  • Live location — latitude/longitude, accuracy, speed — while the app is open and, if you turn on background sharing, while it is closed. Background sharing shows a persistent notification on your phone while it is active.
  • Location history — your recent positions, used to draw where a member has been and to build the Report (distance, top speed, halts, time moving).
  • Place events — when you arrive at or leave a place your Circle has marked (home, school, work). We store the event, not a continuous trace, and quiet hours set on a place stop it being announced.

Group trips

Trips are for adults (18 and over). If you take part in a trip, your live location is shown to the other verified riders of that trip, and only while the trip is live. For a trip we also keep: its name and route (the stops); when you reached each stop (worked out from your location, or marked by an organizer who vouched for you); the path you rode, taken from your stored location history; and the report and journey map built from it (distance, top speed, riding time, and estimated braking and acceleration). Every verified rider can see the trip’s report and journey, which include each rider’s distance and speed. An organizer can remove a rider, and can delete a finished trip, which deletes its report and journey for everyone who rode. Trips use the same location service as your Circles, so there is no second tracker; being in a live trip only makes it report more often.

Live links, check-ins and SOS

  • Live links (adults only) show your position, in a web browser, to anyone you send the link to, until it expires or you stop it. Only a hash of the link’s secret is stored, so a leak of our database does not leak working links.
  • Check-ins, SOS, crash and flight events — when you tap “I’m safe”, send an SOS, or a possible crash or flight is detected, we record the event and tell your Circle. Crash detection alerts your Circle, not emergency services.

Support messages

If you write to us from Settings → Help & feedback we keep what you send: the category you chose, your message, a reply email (the one you give, or the email on your account), and, if you leave that switch on, your app version, phone model and Android version. The message is linked to your account so we can look into what happened. It is visible to Traxl staff in our admin dashboard and to no other user, and is deleted when you delete your account. If you email support@traxl.in instead, we keep that email in our mailbox for as long as we need it to help you.

Device

  • Battery level, only so your Circle can be told when your phone is about to die.
  • Phone state — whether location permission and location services are on, whether battery saver or paused sharing is on, and the network type. The app reports it when you open it, and when we ask a phone that has gone quiet, so your Circle is shown a reason instead of a bare “last seen”.
  • How you use the app — we count actions such as opening the app or creating a Circle (an event name and a few short labels, never locations, names or message text) to learn which features are used. It is not shared with advertisers.
  • Push notification token, so alerts (SOS, arrivals, low battery, ring) reach you when the app is closed.
  • Crash and performance data via Firebase Crashlytics — device model, OS version, app version and a stack trace when something goes wrong. No location or phone numbers are attached to crash reports.
  • App integrity checks via Firebase App Check / Play Integrity, which confirm requests come from a genuine copy of the app. This does not identify you.

What we do not collect

Traxl does not access your contacts, messages, call history, or photos other than a profile picture you pick. It does not record audio or video.

Approximate network location

When your app connects, our network provider (Cloudflare) tells us roughly which country, region and city the connection comes from. We keep only that coarse place — never your IP address — to run and protect the service (for example, spotting a sign-in from an unexpected country) and to understand where Traxl is used. It is separate from, and far less precise than, the live location you share with your Circle.

Advertising on the free plan

The free plan shows banner ads (Home, Settings, the Circle member list, and a member’s or a trip’s Report) and an occasional full-screen ad when you open a Circle or a Report, served by Google AdMob. To do that, the AdMob SDK on your phone receives your device’s advertising ID, IP address, device and app details, and general diagnostics, under Google’s own privacy policy. Traxl never passes your location, your Circles, or anything else it holds about you to AdMob, and ads are not chosen based on where you are or have been. People under 18 are never shown personalised ads, and only family-friendly ad content is requested for them. Everyone can limit ad personalisation from the phone’s Android settings (Google → Ads); where the law requires it (for example the EEA, the UK and some US states) we ask for your choice first and you can change it any time in Settings → Ad privacy. Traxl Plus removes ads entirely.

2. Who can see your location

Only the members of a Circle you have joined, and only while you remain a member; for a group trip, the verified riders of that live trip; and for a live link, whoever you send it to. Nothing is public. Leaving a Circle stops sharing with it immediately; the members keep no live access, though place events and alerts that already happened stay in that Circle’s activity feed.

Traxl staff do not browse individual users’ locations. Access to production data is limited to what is needed to run, secure and debug the service, and every such access is by a named person over an authenticated connection.

3. How we use your data

  • To show your position, path and status to your Circle members.
  • To detect arrivals and departures at marked places and notify your Circle.
  • To deliver SOS alerts with your exact location to everyone in your Circle.
  • To build per-member Reports and group trip reports and journey maps.
  • To run group trips: detecting when riders reach a stop and telling the organizers.
  • To answer the messages you send to support.
  • To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and fix crashes.

We do not sell personal data, we do not share location data with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not use it to profile you for marketing.

4. Service providers

Traxl relies on a small number of processors, each bound by their own terms:

  • Google Firebase — authentication, push notifications, App Check, crash reporting.
  • Google Maps Platform — map tiles, place search and routing shown in the app.
  • Cloudflare — network delivery and protection for our API and website.
  • Vercel — hosting for traxl.in.
  • Google AdMob — banner and full-screen ads on the free plan (see “Advertising on the free plan” above).

Our own servers, which hold accounts, Circles, locations and history, are operated by us in India. If you use Traxl from another country, your data is transferred to and stored in India. Data may also be processed in other countries (for example the United States) by the providers above; each of them publishes its own safeguards for such transfers.

5. How long we keep it

  • Live location: the latest position is kept so your Circle can see you; earlier positions become history.
  • Location history and place events: 30 days on the free plan and 365 days on Traxl Plus, counted from when each position was recorded; older positions are deleted. Reports for a past range are computed from the positions still kept, so they cover at most that window.
  • Account, name, date of birth, photo, Circles: until you delete your account.
  • Group trips (route, arrivals, report): until an organizer deletes the trip or the organizer’s account is deleted. The distance and path in a report come from location history, so they cover at most the 30 or 365 days above. Deleting a trip does not return a trip to a free plan’s monthly allowance: we keep a count of how many trips an account has created, without the trip’s contents, for as long as the account exists.
  • Live links: stop working when they expire or you stop them; their records are removed with your account.
  • Support messages: until you delete your account.
  • Guardian consent records (section 7): kept with the membership they relate to, and deleted when the membership or the account is deleted.
  • Crash reports: 90 days (Crashlytics default).

6. Your choices and rights

  • Stop sharing — leave a Circle, turn off background sharing in Settings, or revoke the location permission in Android settings.
  • See your data — Settings → Export my data downloads everything we hold about you.
  • Correct your data — change your name and photo in Settings at any time.
  • Delete your account — Settings → Delete account removes your account, locations, history, photo, device tokens, support messages, live links and any trips you organized, immediately. See Delete Account & Data for the steps if you no longer have the app.
  • Sign out everywhere — signing out invalidates every session, including a lost phone’s.

You can exercise these rights from the app or by writing to privacy@traxl.in. We respond within 30 days. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act you may also nominate someone to exercise these rights on your behalf.

7. Children and age rules

Traxl is for people aged 13 and over, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

  • Age check. The app asks for a date of birth once, with no hint of which age is “allowed”. If it shows someone is under 13, the account and everything entered are deleted immediately and that phone cannot sign in. If we learn an under-13 account exists in any other way, we delete it. A parent who thinks their child’s data is with us can write to us (see section 10) and we will delete it.
  • Ages 13 to 17. A teenager can only join a Circle through an invite made by their parent or legal guardian, who confirms in the app that they are the person’s parent or guardian and consent to their location being shared with that Circle. We record who confirmed it, when, and which wording they agreed to. A teenager cannot create a Circle, can leave a Circle or pause sharing at any time, and is never shown personalised ads.
  • Parents and guardians. You can remove your child from your Circle at any time, ask us to delete their account and data, or ask for a copy of it (section 10).
  • Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act anyone under 18 is a child; the guardian-confirmed invite described above is how we obtain a parent’s consent.

8. Security

All traffic between the app, our servers and our providers is encrypted in transit. Session tokens are stored encrypted on your device and expire regularly. Our servers are reachable only through authenticated tunnels, and databases are not exposed to the internet. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will notify you and the regulators the law requires (for example the Data Protection Board of India, or state authorities in the United States) within the time the law sets.

9. Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or how we use it, we will update this page, change the effective date above, and tell you in the app before the change applies to you.

10. Additional information for people in the United States

This section is for residents of US states with privacy laws (such as California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon and Maryland). It adds to the rest of this policy.

  • What we collect, by the usual legal categories: identifiers (phone number, email, name, advertising ID, push token); precise geolocation and location history (a “sensitive” category); date of birth; commercial information (whether you subscribe to Plus); internet and device activity (battery, crash data, ad requests, which features you use); the messages you send to support; and a profile photo and emergency contact if you add them. Sections 1 and 3 explain why.
  • We do not sell personal information and we do not share precise location with anyone outside your Circle and the service providers in section 4. We use precise location only to provide the features you ask for, and we do not use it to infer other things about you.
  • Targeted advertising. On the free plan, the advertising ID that Google AdMob receives can count as “sharing” or targeted advertising under some state laws. You can opt out in Settings → Ad privacy (shown where the law requires it) or in your Android settings (Google → Ads), or remove ads by subscribing to Traxl Plus. We never show personalised ads to anyone under 18.
  • Your rights: to know and access what we hold, delete it, correct it, get a portable copy, opt out of targeted advertising and sale, and not be treated worse for using these rights. Use Settings → Export my data and Delete account in the app, or email privacy@traxl.in. We respond within 45 days, and we may confirm it is you by asking you to reply from the account’s sign-in method. If we refuse a request you can ask us to reconsider by replying to our answer. An authorised agent can write to us on your behalf.

11. Other countries

If the law where you live gives you rights beyond those described here, write to us and we will honour them where we can.

12. Contact

Privacy requests: privacy@traxl.in. Help with the app: support@traxl.in or traxl.in/support.