Privacy Policy
In short: Tail End Charlie shares your live location with your own ride group while a ride is active, so the group can stay together. That data is encrypted at rest, kept only briefly, and deleted automatically. The app has no analytics, no advertising, no trackers, and does not sell data. Your emergency contact details stay on your phone unless you choose to share them, or opt in to auto-sharing with the ride leader during an emergency-stop alert — both described below. You can read the full detail below, or jump straight to your rights or how to delete your data.
Alpha notice: Tail End Charlie is in active development. As we add and change features, what data we collect and how we handle it may change too, so this policy should be treated as preliminary and is likely to be updated frequently during this stage. We'll keep it accurate as the app evolves.
Who we are
Tail End Charlie is a group-riding app for motorcyclists, developed and operated by Holt Racing Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 12633258, registered office Hockford Cottage, Ash Road, Pirbright, Woking, Surrey, England, GU24 0DE). For the purposes of UK data protection law, Holt Racing Limited is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.
Information we collect
Location data
While you have an active ride open, the app uses your device's GPS to show your position to the rest of your ride group, provide turn-by-turn navigation, and detect and warn about route deviations. Location sharing only happens while a ride screen is open and only with the group you are riding with — you can pause or stop it at any time from within the app.
Ride and group data
To keep a ride group coordinated, the app synchronises a small set of ride events between group members: your chosen display name and marker colour, your live position, hazard reports and route-deviation alerts, an emergency-stop alert if you trigger one, and, if a ride leader records one, the reference route for the ride. This data is only visible to people in the same ride (joined using that ride's six-digit code) and, where the app is online, passes through our relay server described below.
Emergency contact (ICE) sharing
Your in-case-of-emergency contact name, phone number, and any medical notes stay on your device by default and are not included in the ride and group data above. They only reach anyone else in the ride if:
- you explicitly choose to share them with the whole group, from the ride menu; or
- you have switched on the optional setting to share them automatically with whoever currently holds the ride-leader role, which then happens whenever you send an emergency-stop alert.
When shared, the recipient's app tells your app once they've opened it, so you can see it was seen. A copy a leader (or other recipient) receives is deleted automatically when the ride ends, unless they've called or texted the contact from within the app, in which case it's kept so they can follow up.
Other information that stays on your device
The following is stored only in the app's local storage on your phone and is never sent to our relay server, to other riders, or anywhere else:
- Your distance-unit and display preferences.
- Imported or recorded GPX route files you haven't shared.
Device identifier
The app generates a random identifier on your device to distinguish participants within a ride's event stream. It is not your name, email address, phone number, or an Apple or Google account identifier — the app does not have user accounts or sign-in at all.
Technical and security information
Our relay server processes your connection's IP address transiently, to apply rate limits and prevent abuse. It is not written to the database alongside ride data. Standard web-server logs (e.g. connection timestamps) may be kept briefly for security and operational purposes.
How we use your information
- To share your position and status with your own ride group.
- To provide navigation and route-deviation warnings.
- To relay hazard reports, alerts, and emergency-stop signals between riders in the same ride.
- To operate destination search and road routing (see Third parties, below).
- To secure the relay service against abuse and misuse.
We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, or analytics, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.
Our legal bases for processing
Under UK GDPR, we rely on:
- Consent — for location sharing, which the operating system asks you to grant and which you can withdraw at any time in your device settings or by pausing sharing in the app; and for sharing your emergency contact details, which only happens if you take an explicit sharing action or switch on the default-share-with-leader setting yourself.
- Contract — processing ride events is necessary to provide the group-riding feature you're actively using.
- Legitimate interests — for rate-limiting, abuse prevention, and keeping the relay service secure and reliable.
Who we share information with
Destination search and routing. By default, the app sends destination search text and route requests to the OpenStreetMap Foundation's public Nominatim and OSRM services to find places and calculate routes. These are independent third-party services with their own privacy policy.
App marketplaces. Apple and Google process installation and device information as part of operating the App Store and Google Play, under their own privacy policies.
We do not use advertising networks, analytics SDKs, crash-reporting services, or any other third-party trackers in the app, and we do not share ride or location data with data brokers or any other third party.
How long we keep information
Ride data is kept only as long as it is useful for the ride it belongs to, and is deleted automatically by the relay server:
| Data | Kept for at most |
|---|---|
| Live location updates | 30 minutes |
| Status messages and route-deviation alerts | 2 hours |
| Hazard reports | 24 hours |
| A shared emergency contact, on the server | 2 hours |
| A ride's remaining records, after the ride is ended | 24 hours |
| A ride record overall (if never explicitly ended) | 72 hours from creation |
A cleanup process runs on the server and permanently deletes anything past its expiry — retention limits are enforced automatically, not just promised. Information kept only on your device (see above) is kept until you delete it or uninstall the app.
How we protect your information
- Connections to the relay server are encrypted in transit (TLS).
- Ride event content is encrypted at rest on the server using AES-256-GCM. This protects stored data against, for example, theft of a database file or backup; it does not mean the data is end-to-end encrypted between riders, since the relay operator holds the key needed to relay events between group members.
- Ride join codes are short-lived, rate-limited, and stored as encrypted, hashed records rather than plain codes.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:
- Ask what personal data we hold about you and get a copy of it.
- Ask us to correct inaccurate data.
- Ask us to delete your data (see below).
- Object to or ask us to restrict certain processing.
- Ask for your data in a portable format, where applicable.
- Withdraw consent at any time, for anything we process based on consent, without affecting processing that already happened.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details below. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.
Deleting your information
- Uninstalling the app immediately removes everything stored on your device, including any ICE details and preferences.
- Ride data on the relay server deletes itself automatically on the schedule above — there is nothing you need to do.
- To request earlier deletion of a specific ride's data, or ask any other question about your data, email us at the address below.
Children
Tail End Charlie is not directed at, or intended for use by, children under 16.
International transfers
Our relay server is operated from the United Kingdom. Where the app contacts third-party services described above (destination search and routing), those requests may be processed on infrastructure outside the UK, governed by that service's own privacy policy.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the app changes. We'll update the effective date above when we do, and material changes will be reflected here before or when they take effect.
Contact us
Holt Racing Limited · privacy@tailendcharlie.app