This privacy policy applies to the OpenHikes app for mobile devices, together with any related services operated by Zsombor Rajki (collectively, the "Application"). Zsombor Rajki is hereby referred to as the "Service Provider".
OpenHikes has no account and no login. What you record stays on your device — your iPhone, and your Apple Watch if you use the watch app — and, if you leave iCloud sync enabled, syncs only to your own private iCloud storage, which the Service Provider cannot read. The Application contains no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking of any kind.
There is one exception, and it happens only when you ask for it: sharing a hike with the community, or adding your photographs to a trail somebody has already shared. Choosing to share publishes that hike — its route, its photographs, and a name you type — to a shared database the Service Provider operates, so that other people using the Application can find it. Nothing is shared unless you tap Share on a specific hike and confirm. Everything else in this policy describes an Application that sends the Service Provider nothing, and that remains true if you never share a hike. See Sharing a hike with the community and Adding your photographs to a trail that is already there.
The Application does not require registration. Apart from a hike you explicitly choose to share, it collects no personal information on behalf of the Service Provider. It does create and store data on your device in order to work:
This data lives in the Application’s storage on your device. It is not sent to the Service Provider, who has no means of accessing it.
If you use the Apple Watch app, it keeps three things of its own on the watch: the list of your hikes, the trail you last opened there, and any walk it has recorded that your iPhone has not yet confirmed receiving. See The Apple Watch app.
Yes. Recording a hike requires precise, real-time location — that is what a recorded trail is. The Application uses location in five distinct ways:
Location data is written to your device. Except for the route of a hike you choose to share, it is not transmitted to the Service Provider, is not sold, is not shared for advertising, and is not used for any purpose beyond the five above. You can review, downgrade, or revoke location access at any time in the iOS Settings app, and the Application’s own switches for Background Trail Tracking and pause reminders are in its Settings screen. Hikes already recorded remain on your device until you delete them.
If iCloud sync is left enabled, your hikes are mirrored to your own private iCloud database so that they appear on your other devices. This uses Apple’s CloudKit service and your personal Apple Account. The data is held in your private storage, not in any database belonging to the Service Provider, and the Service Provider cannot read, retrieve, or delete it. Apple’s handling of that data is governed by Apple’s own privacy policy. You can turn iCloud sync off in the Application’s settings.
The Application includes an Apple Watch app. What it holds on the watch is listed above; this section is about what crosses between the two devices, because nothing else about the watch is new.
The link is Apple’s Watch Connectivity, which carries data directly between your own paired iPhone and watch and through no service of the Service Provider’s. Your iPhone sends the titles and figures of your hikes so the watch can list them, and the route of the one trail you open there. While the watch app is open, your iPhone also tells it whether the iPhone is recording a hike and, if it is, that recording’s running figures — how far, how long, whether it is paused, and the name of the trail it is on — so the watch can show it; the watch sends back the Start, Pause, Resume or Stop you tap there. The watch sends back a walk it has recorded, and keeps that walk on its own storage until your iPhone confirms it has it — which is deliberate, because until then the watch holds the only copy. Photographs never go to the watch, and neither do your notes.
The map on the watch is drawn by Apple rather than from the tile providers listed below, so displaying it reveals the area being shown to Apple in the same way any Apple Maps request does. The watch contacts nothing else: no tile provider, no Overpass, no weather service, and no CloudKit.
Deleting OpenHikes from your iPhone removes the watch app with it, including any walk still waiting to be handed over.
Photographs you take within the Application are stored with the hike on your device. If you turn on “Also Save to Photos”, a copy is additionally written to your photo library. The “Find Photos of This Hike” feature reads your photo library on the device, limited to pictures taken between the first and last point of the hike you are viewing, in order to pin them to the trail; it does not browse your wider library and it does not upload anything. Camera and photo library access can be revoked at any time in the iOS Settings app.
If you turn on “Save Hikes to Health”, a hike you finish recording is also written to the Health app on your device as a hiking workout, carrying its distance, its duration, how far it climbed and descended, and its route — and, when the Application checked the weather where you were while you walked, that temperature and humidity. This is off until you turn it on, and turning it on is what asks for permission. On your iPhone the Application only ever writes to Health — it reads nothing from it, and asks for no read access at all. What is written stays in your own Health store on your own device; the Service Provider cannot see it, and nothing about it is uploaded anywhere. You can revoke the Application’s Health access at any time in the iOS Settings app or in the Health app, and workouts already written stay in Health until you delete them there.
On Apple Watch there is one exception, and it is the only thing the Application reads from Health anywhere. Recording a hike on the watch starts a hiking workout session, because that is what keeps a recording running with the screen dark, and the watch asks to read your heart rate so that it can show it to you while you walk. That reading is shown and nothing more: it is not added to the hike, not sent to your iPhone, not written to Health, not stored on the watch, and never uploaded anywhere. The workout the session builds is deliberately thrown away when the recording ends rather than saved, so a walk recorded on the watch does not put a second workout in your Health store — the walk goes to your iPhone, and your iPhone writes it to Health once, and only if you turned the switch above on. The prompt asks for two things and they are not the same: refusing the heart rate costs you the reading and nothing else, while permission to start the workout is what the recording itself runs on, so the watch says it cannot record without it.
The Application lets you publish one of your hikes so that other people using it can find and save that trail. This is entirely optional, is never automatic, and applies only to hikes you explicitly choose to share.
What is sent when you share a hike:
What this means: a shared hike goes to a public database operated by the Service Provider using Apple’s CloudKit. Unlike the private iCloud sync described above, the Service Provider can read this data, and so — once published — can anybody else using the Application. Apple records which Apple Account submitted each shared hike, and the Service Provider can see that identifier. This is what makes it possible to review submissions and to remove one on request.
Review before publication: a hike you send is not published, listed, or searchable by anyone until a person has reviewed it, and nothing in the Application can find it in the meantime. Every submission is reviewed by a person before it is published, in order to keep inaccurate or inappropriate content out of the Application. When you send a hike the Application says only that it has been sent, because at that moment that is all it knows. Afterwards it can find out one thing on its own: whether a published listing exists for your submission. It asks that when you open that hike, and remembers a yes — so a hike you shared reads as waiting for review until it appears publicly and as published to the community once it does. What it cannot tell you is the difference between a submission nobody has looked at yet and one a reviewer decided not to publish: a decision not to publish leaves nothing behind for the Application to see, so both keep reading as waiting. A submission cannot be altered once it is sent — not by you and not by anyone using a modified copy of the Application — so what is reviewed is what other people later download. A reviewer may make two corrections before publishing it, and no others: they may publish the hike under a corrected title, which does not change the title you sent; and they may leave out individual photographs, which deletes those photographs and publishes the rest of the hike as you sent it. Both happen before anything is published, and the alternative to either was declining the whole submission. Your route, your description and the name you typed are never edited. A shared hike cannot be changed, and the Application will not send a second copy of one. To replace a hike you have shared, ask for it to be removed — see Removal below — and share the corrected walk once it has been taken down.
Please do not share what you do not want published. A shared route reveals where you walked, and a trail that begins at your home reveals where you live. Photographs of identifiable people should not be shared without their agreement.
Removal: to have a hike you shared taken down, open it in the Application, tap the community button on its screen and choose Ask for Removal. The Application composes the message — the hike’s title, the date of the walk, whether it has been published, and the record names that identify it in the database — and opens it in your mail app so that you can read and send it. It carries nothing about you beyond whatever your mail app puts on a message you send. You can also email zsombor.rajki@gmail.com directly, with enough detail to identify the hike. Removing the hike from your own device does not withdraw a submission you have already sent — which is why deleting a shared hike offers Ask for Removal First before it goes. The Application is not told when a hike is taken down, so a hike you have asked about goes on reading as published to the community until you check: the same menu offers Check Whether It’s Still Live, which asks the database once and, if the hike is gone, offers to reset it on your device so that a corrected walk can be shared in its place. Resetting forgets the record names a removal request quotes, so it is offered only once the hike is already gone.
Reporting somebody else’s hike: every published hike has a menu on the screen that shows it, offering Report. Tapping it asks what is wrong — offensive or inappropriate content, a private place or an identifiable person, something published without permission, or a dangerous or misleading route — and lets you add anything that helps. The report is prepared as an email to zsombor.rajki@gmail.com and opens in your mail app so that you can read and send it; it identifies the hike being reported, and it carries nothing about you beyond whatever your mail app puts on a message you send. You do not need an Apple Account to report a hike, just as you do not need one to browse. Reports are read and acted on within 24 hours, and a hike found to be objectionable is removed for everybody.
Blocking somebody: the same menu offers Block. Blocking hides every hike that person has shared, and every hike they share later, from the Application on that device. It is kept on the device and nowhere else: it is not sent to the Service Provider, it does not travel to your other devices, and it removes nothing for anybody else. It needs no Apple Account. The people you have blocked are listed under Blocked in Settings, where each entry can be undone. Blocking is not a report — to have a hike taken down for everybody, report it.
Saving somebody else’s hike: when you save a shared hike to your own list, its route, the places its author marked along it, and its photographs are downloaded to your device — the photographs its author published and any that other people have added to the trail since, each kept with the credit its contributor asked to be named by. Downloaded photographs are never added to your photo library, and none of them becomes yours to publish: the Application will not offer a photograph you saved from somebody else back to the community.
A trail you find in the Application may already be listed — because somebody published it, or because it is one of the signposted routes OpenStreetMap knows about. If you save that trail, walk it and photograph it, the Application offers to add your photographs to the trail that is already there rather than publishing a second copy of the same route. This is optional and never automatic: it happens when you tap the community button on your own copy of the hike and send them.
What is sent when you add photographs:
Your walk itself is not sent. Your route, your notes, the places you marked and what you called the hike stay on your device, and a photograph you filed under one of your places is sent without saying so. That is the whole difference between this and sharing a hike: the trail is already public, so what is published is the photographs and nothing else.
The same review, and the same removal. Photographs you add are not visible to anybody until a person has reviewed them, and the Application says only that they have been sent until it can see that a published record exists for them. A reviewer may leave out individual photographs before publishing the rest, which deletes the ones they leave out; they can change nothing else, because there is nothing else. To have photographs you added taken down, open your own copy of the hike, tap the community button and choose Ask for Removal — it names the photographs and not the trail, which belongs to somebody else.
Reporting and blocking work on the photograph. Photographs somebody added are shown alongside the trail’s own, each with the name of whoever added it. Opening one offers Report Photo and Block, and both are about that person rather than about whoever published the trail: reporting asks for those photographs to be removed and leaves the trail alone, and blocking hides that person’s photographs everywhere in the Application on that device. The same 24-hour commitment applies.
Please add only photographs you took, on that trail. A photograph taken at your home shows where you live, and photographs of identifiable people should not be published without their agreement.
Apart from a hike you choose to share, the Service Provider does not share your information, because the Service Provider does not receive it. However, some features require the Application to contact third-party services directly from your device, and those requests necessarily reveal something about the area you are looking at — and, when you search, the words you typed. Other than a shared hike, no account, name, or identifier is sent.
tile.openstreetmap.org, tiles.stadiamaps.com, or tile.thunderforest.com, depending on the map style you have selected. Each request identifies the map square being displayed, which indicates approximately where you are looking. These are governed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s, Stadia Maps’, and Thunderforest’s own privacy policies. The Apple Watch app uses none of them; it draws Apple’s own map.overpass-api.de carry the bounding box of the area for which trail geometry is being looked up. This happens for five reasons: to work out what the trails under a hike you are looking at are made of, to find the waymarked routes OpenStreetMap already knows about near an area you have asked to search, to draw a trail of your own along the paths that are really there, to find what is mapped on and around a hike you have saved when you open Places Around Trail on it, and to find what is mapped where you are standing when you tap Add Place while recording. The second is described under Waymarked routes from OpenStreetMap below and the third under Drawing a trail. Places Around Trail sends the areas the hike’s route runs through, reaching up to a kilometre either side of it, one after another, and the area on screen when you tap Search This Area. Add Place sends a small area, about three hundred metres across, around your position at the moment you tap it — which is, necessarily, where you are — and nothing else about you; places found by either are kept on your device for thirty days, as the maker’s are, and never sent anywhere. Governed by the Overpass API operator’s own terms.These services may log request data, including your IP address, under their own policies. The Service Provider receives none of it.
You can stop all collection by uninstalling the Application, except for a hike you have already chosen to share, which is withdrawn by email as described under Sharing a hike with the community. Sharing is off unless you use it: if you never tap Share on a hike, the Service Provider receives nothing at all. Within the Application you can delete individual hikes and their photographs, turn off iCloud sync, turn off Background Trail Tracking, and turn off “Remind Me to Pause and Resume”, which stops a paused hike being watched for movement. Location, camera, and photo library access can be revoked at any time in the iOS Settings app. Uninstalling removes the data the Application stored on your device — and, because the watch app goes with the iPhone app, what the watch stored as well; hikes already mirrored to your iCloud storage are removed through iCloud in the usual way.
If you contact the Service Provider directly or voluntarily provide information by other means, you may request deletion of that information by contacting zsombor.rajki@gmail.com.
The Application is not intended for children under 16 years of age, or such higher age as required by applicable law. The Service Provider does not knowingly solicit data from children or market to them. Since the Application transmits no personal information to the Service Provider through normal use, children’s data is not at risk from use of the Application alone. If you voluntarily provide personal information through other means and are under 16 years of age, your parent or guardian must provide consent on your behalf where permitted by law.
Your hikes, photographs, and settings are held on your device and are protected by your device’s own security. It is your responsibility to keep your device secure and up to date. The Service Provider operates no server of its own; hikes you choose to share are held in Apple’s CloudKit under Apple’s security, in a database intended to be publicly readable. No system is completely secure, and data you place in iCloud is protected by Apple under Apple’s terms.
Other than hikes you choose to share, the Service Provider does not receive or store your personal data, and holds no system of its own that could be breached. A hike you have shared is already intended to be public, so its publication is not a breach. If a breach occurs involving any data you have voluntarily provided, the Service Provider will notify you as required by applicable law.
The Service Provider may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The Service Provider will notify you of material changes by posting the updated Privacy Policy with an effective date. Where required by law, the Service Provider will seek your consent to material changes before they take effect.
Previous versions of this Privacy Policy will be maintained and made available upon request by contacting the Service Provider at zsombor.rajki@gmail.com.
This privacy policy is effective as of 2026-09-25.
If you voluntarily provide information to the Service Provider and processing is based on consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time without affecting processing carried out before withdrawal.
If you have any questions regarding privacy while using the Application, or have questions about the practices, please contact the Service Provider via email at zsombor.rajki@gmail.com.
This page was generated with the App Privacy Policy Generator and edited to describe this application’s actual behaviour.