Privacy Policy

1. Data Controller

TrekFreely is the data controller responsible for your personal data. TrekFreely is an outdoor safety and stewardship platform whose safety features are free to use; an optional merchandise shop and voluntary donations help sustain the project. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We do not serve advertisements, and we do not use your personal data for third-party marketing.

For privacy inquiries, contact us at privacy@trekfreely.org.

2. Information We Collect

Information you provide directly

• Account information: Email address and display name when you create an account.
• Trip plan data: Trip details including destinations, routes, start and return times, vehicle descriptions, group members, gear lists, and activity type.
• Emergency contact information: Names, phone numbers, and email addresses of contacts you designate for trip notifications.
• Medical information: Medical conditions, allergies, and other health information you voluntarily provide in trip plans. This data is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM encryption and is only accessible during SAR handoff scenarios you explicitly initiate.
• Communications: Messages you send through the check-in system, including SMS and satellite communicator messages.
• Shop orders: When you purchase merchandise, we collect the shipping name and address you enter and the details of your order. Payment card information is entered directly with our payment processor (Stripe) during checkout and is never received or stored by TrekFreely.
• Donations: When you make a voluntary donation, our payment processor (Stripe) handles your payment. We receive a confirmation and the amount donated, not your card details.
• Newsletter subscription: If you subscribe to our newsletter, we collect the email address you provide for that purpose.
• Contact form: If you use our contact form, we collect the name, email address, and message you enter. Submissions are delivered to us by email and are not stored in a database; the transmission record is deleted within 90 days.
• Survey responses: If you take our audience survey, we store your answers together with the audience group you selected and the submission date. Survey answers are stored without your name, account, email address, IP address, or any other identifier — even if you are signed in when you take it. Two optional choices at the end of the survey work differently: if you ask for a copy of your responses by email, the address you enter is used to send that one message and is not stored; if you ask us to contact you about your answers, the email address you provide is stored with your answers (encrypted at rest), and that response is no longer anonymous.

Information collected automatically

• Location data: GPS coordinates received from satellite communicators (Garmin inReach, SPOT), APRS-IS feeds, SMS coordinate messages, or mobile app location sharing when you explicitly enable it for an active trip.
• Check-in data: Timestamps and status of trip check-ins.
• Device information: Battery level and signal data from satellite communicators when available.
• Smart watch vitals: If you connect a smart watch — through a Garmin account link or the TrekFreely watch app — we receive wellness readings from your watch (heart rate, blood oxygen, stress level, respiration, elevation, steps, and floors climbed) while you have a trip underway with the smart watch feature enabled. Only your most recent readings are held, briefly and in temporary storage: we never build or keep a history of your health data, and readings are never written to our database or logs. We also store the connection credentials needed to receive this data (encrypted at rest); the watch app itself collects no location data. You can disconnect or unpair at any time from your account settings, which stops all data flow immediately.
• QR code scans: When you scan a TrekFreely-printed QR code (for example, a sticker at a trailhead register or kiosk), we log a timestamp, the campaign identifier embedded in the code, the country derived from your IP address, and a coarse device family (iOS, Android, or Other) derived from your browser's User-Agent string. We do not store the IP address itself, the full User-Agent, or any other identifier. Scans are never linked to a user account.

Information we do not collect

• We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or analytics cookies.
• We do not collect browsing behavior, click patterns, or page view histories.
• We do not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or any third-party tracking service.
• We do not fingerprint browsers or devices.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your information exclusively for the following purposes:

• Service delivery: Operating trip planning, check-in, and contact dashboard features.
• Safety notifications: Sending check-in reminders, missed check-in alerts, and overdue notifications to your designated emergency contacts.
• SAR coordination: Providing trip plan data to Search and Rescue organizations when you or your emergency contacts explicitly initiate a SAR handoff.
• Watch vitals display: Showing your latest smart watch readings on your trip dashboards — visible only to you and the emergency contacts you designated — while a trip is underway.
• Transactional communications: Sending magic link login emails, trip activation confirmations, and system notifications directly related to your use of the service.
• Order fulfillment: Processing shop purchases and donations, calculating shipping, fulfilling and shipping orders, and sending order confirmations and shipping updates.
• Newsletter: Sending our newsletter to subscribers who have opted in. Every newsletter includes an unsubscribe link, and you can opt out at any time.
• Service improvement: Aggregated, anonymized usage patterns to improve platform reliability. No individual user data is used for this purpose.
• Print-campaign measurement: Aggregated QR-code scan counts to evaluate which printed materials (stickers, kiosk signs, brochures) generate engagement. Counts are never linked to a user account, never sold or shared, and never used to build a profile of any individual.
• Responding to you: Answering messages you send through the contact form, and — only if you asked us to on the survey — following up with you about your survey answers. You can withdraw a survey contact request at any time by emailing privacy@trekfreely.org, and we will delete the stored address; your survey answers remain, anonymous again.

4. Legal Bases for Processing (GDPR)

For users in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom, and Switzerland, we process your personal data under the following legal bases:

• Contract: Processing necessary to provide the services you have requested, including trip planning, check-in monitoring, and contact dashboard access.
• Consent: Where you have given explicit consent, such as providing medical information in trip plans or enabling location tracking.
• Legitimate interest: Processing necessary for our legitimate interests, such as maintaining platform security and preventing abuse, where those interests are not overridden by your rights.
• Vital interest: In emergency situations where processing is necessary to protect your life or the life of another person, such as SAR escalation scenarios.

5. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to any third party. In particular, mobile information collected for text messaging — your phone number and your consent to be texted — is never shared with or sold to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes (see Text Messaging (SMS)). We share data only in the following limited circumstances:

• Emergency contacts: Trip plan details (excluding medical notes) are shared with contacts you designate, via the contact dashboard you provide them access to.
• SAR organizations: Trip plan data including medical notes is shared with Search and Rescue organizations only when you or your emergency contacts explicitly initiate a SAR handoff.
• Legal requirements: We may disclose data when required by valid legal process. See our Law Enforcement & Data Request Policy for details.
• Service providers: Our infrastructure is self-hosted. We use a limited set of third-party providers, each of which processes data only as necessary to deliver its service:
  • Cloudflare, Inc. (United States) for CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, secure tunnel ingress, and bot protection (Turnstile).
  • Amazon Web Services, Inc. (Amazon SES) (United States) for sending magic link login emails, safety notifications, order confirmations, and the newsletter.
  • Stripe, Inc. (United States) for processing shop purchases and donations. Stripe collects and processes billing and payment card data directly under its own privacy policy; TrekFreely does not receive or store full card numbers.
  • VoIP.ms (Canada) for delivering SMS sign-in codes and safety alerts. It processes your phone number and message content solely to transmit the message.
  • United States Postal Service (USPS) (United States) for calculating shipping rates. Only a destination ZIP code is sent to USPS for rate lookups.
• Map rendering: Trip planning pages use Mapbox GL JS for interactive map rendering. Mapbox collects anonymous usage telemetry (map load counts, browser type, and general location derived from IP address) as required by their Terms of Service. No TrekFreely user data, trip details, routes, or personal information is sent to Mapbox. See Mapbox's Privacy Policy for details on their data practices.

6. Data Retention

We retain your data only as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy.

7. Data Security

We take the security of your data seriously. Measures include:

• TLS 1.3 encryption for all data in transit.
• AES-256-GCM field-level encryption for sensitive data (medical notes, raw device payloads).
• HSTS preloading with one-year max-age.
• Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite=Strict session cookies.
• Automated security scanning (SAST, dependency scanning, secret detection) in our CI/CD pipeline.
• Content Security Policy, Referrer-Policy, and Permissions-Policy headers.

For more details, see our Security page.

8. Your Rights Under GDPR

If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, you have the following rights:

• Right of access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Right to rectification: Request correction of inaccurate personal data.
• Right to erasure: Request deletion of your personal data, subject to legal retention obligations.
• Right to restriction: Request restriction of processing in certain circumstances.
• Right to data portability: Receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Right to object: Object to processing based on legitimate interest.
• Right to withdraw consent: Withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent.

To exercise these rights, contact privacy@trekfreely.org. We will respond within 30 days. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

9. Your Rights Under CCPA/CPRA

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) provide you with the following rights:

• Right to know: Request disclosure of the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.
• Right to delete: Request deletion of your personal information.
• Right to correct: Request correction of inaccurate personal information.
• Right to opt-out of sale or sharing: We do not sell or share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is nothing to opt out of.
• Right to non-discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights.

Categories of personal information collected: Identifiers (email — including a contact email you optionally attach to a survey response — name, shipping address), geolocation data (trip coordinates), health information (voluntarily provided medical notes and, if you connect a smart watch, wellness readings), commercial information (shop purchases and donation records), and internet or other electronic network activity (check-in status).

Sale of personal information: We have not sold personal information in the preceding 12 months. We do not sell personal information. We will never sell personal information.

To exercise these rights, contact privacy@trekfreely.org. We will respond within 45 days as required by law.

10. Cookies and Tracking

TrekFreely uses only strictly necessary session cookies to maintain your login state. These cookies are:

• HttpOnly (not accessible to JavaScript)
• Secure (transmitted only over HTTPS)
• SameSite=Strict (not sent with cross-site requests)
• Stored in server-side Redis (no sensitive data in the cookie itself)

We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, or tracking cookies. We do not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or any third-party tracking service. Our privacy-respecting analytics, when enabled, are cookieless and self-hosted.

11. Children's Privacy

TrekFreely is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete that information promptly. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact privacy@trekfreely.org.

12. International Data Transfers

TrekFreely is operated from the United States. If you access our services from outside the United States, your data will be transferred to and processed in the United States. We take appropriate safeguards to ensure your data is protected in accordance with this policy and applicable law, including the use of Standard Contractual Clauses where required by GDPR.

13. Text Messaging (SMS)

TrekFreely sends two kinds of text message, and only to people who have opted in. We do not send marketing or promotional text messages.

• Sign-in verification codes (2FA): a one-time code when you sign in or enroll a mobile number for two-factor authentication on your account.
• Trip-safety status alerts: time-sensitive alerts about an active trip (for example, an overdue-trip notice), sent to the account holder and to the emergency contacts the account holder designates and confirms they have permission to message.

You opt in by providing a mobile number and agreeing on a TrekFreely form — your account settings, SMS two-factor enrollment, or the emergency-contact form. Consent to receive texts is never a condition of creating or using a TrekFreely account. Message frequency varies, and message and data rates may apply.

You can opt out at any time by replying STOP, END, UNSUBSCRIBE, or CANCEL to any message; we then send a single confirmation and no further messages. Reply HELP for help, or contact contact@trekfreely.org.

Mobile information collected for text messaging — including your phone number and your consent to be texted — is never shared with or sold to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. No mobile opt-in data is shared with third parties. Where a messaging carrier or aggregator transmits a message on our behalf, it acts solely to deliver that message and not for its own marketing.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date. If we make material changes that affect how we handle your data, we will notify you via email if you have an account.

15. Contact Us

For privacy-related questions, requests, or concerns:

• Email: privacy@trekfreely.org

TrekFreely
Colorado, United States