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Privacy policy

Last updated 2026-11-06. Also available in French and Arabic; this English version prevails.

Who we are

WeHike is an independent project. It is free to use, with optional paid plans sold through Google Play. Contact: ubugnu@gmail.com.

What we collect

  • Account data: email address, display handle, optional profile fields you enter (fitness level, home region, bio) and an optional emergency contact, stored privately and not shown to anyone in this version.
  • Location: precise location while the app is open, to show you on the map, sort trails by distance, check you in to an outing and place privacy zones; and while you record or follow a trail, in a foreground service with a visible notification that stops when you stop it. We never collect location in the background. Your position on the map is not stored or shared.
  • Notifications: a device token so we can send outing updates and announcements, weather changes and reminders for hikes you planned, connection requests, and new outings of clubs you follow; each kind can be switched off in Settings.
  • Content you create: trails, ratings, condition reports, outings, messages in outing threads.
  • Clubs: if you create a club page (Organizer plan), its name, description, region, links and logo; if you follow a club, the fact that you follow it, so we can tell you about its new outings.
  • Purchases: if you subscribe to WeHike+ or Organizer, we store the plan, whether it renews and when it expires, and the Google Play purchase token and order number, linked to your account. We use them to unlock the plan's features and to follow renewals and cancellations. Google processes the payment: we never receive your card details. We keep these records while your account exists; when you delete it, they are deleted or unlinked from it, except what the law requires us to keep.
  • Diagnostics: crash reports (Firebase Crashlytics). No advertising identifiers, no analytics SDK.

How we use it

To provide the service: show trails, compute statistics, forecast the weather for a planned hike and check it again 48, 24 and 6 hours before you start, organise outings, tell a club's followers about its new outings, unlock the features of your plan, and keep the app stable. We do not sell data and we show no ads.

Legal bases (EEA and UK)

If you live in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, these are the legal bases we rely on:

  • Contract: to provide your account and the features you use, including a paid plan if you buy one.
  • Legitimate interests: to keep WeHike secure, prevent abuse, moderate content, and read crash reports to fix the app.
  • Consent: for precise location and notifications. You can withdraw it at any time: location in Android settings, notifications in Android settings or in the app's Settings.
  • Legal obligation: to keep purchase records where the law requires it.

You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Service providers

Google Firebase (authentication, database, storage, functions, push notifications, crash reporting — data stored in europe-west1 where the service allows; App Check with Google Play Integrity confirms that requests come from the genuine app), Google Play (subscriptions: Google takes the payment, handles renewals and refunds, and tells our servers the state of your subscription; Google's privacy policy covers the payment), MapTiler (map tiles; your IP address is seen by their servers when tiles load), Open-Meteo (weather; requests are proxied by our servers, your identity is not sent).

Sharing with other users

Public trails and ratings are visible to everyone with your handle. Before a recording is published as a trail, we remove its timestamps, cut 200 m at both ends and everything inside your privacy zones. Connections-only outings are visible to connections you accepted; blocking someone ends the connection. A club page is public, and so is its number of followers; only the club's owner can see who follows it.

The list of participants of an outing is visible only to its organizer, its leader, its sweeper and its co-organizers (up to 5 people that an organizer on the Organizer plan picks among their connections), and to participants once the outing is confirmed. Organizers on the Organizer plan can also export the attendee list (handle, display name, status, when they joined, whether they checked in) to a file they share themselves, and see an attendance history of their past outings: who attended and who did not show up.

When an outing you joined ends, we note whether you attended or did not show up. These counts stay private: other members, organizers included, never see them. They only see a coarse reliability badge worked out from them, on your profile and next to your name in participant lists: new, reliable or no record yet.

Your rights

You can export your recordings (GPX), edit your profile, and delete your account from the app or from this website. Deletion removes your account, profile, recordings and ratings within 30 days, along with your club page and the list of clubs you follow; content you shared in outings may remain visible to participants in anonymised form. Deleting your account does not cancel a Google Play subscription: cancel it in Google Play first.

Age

WeHike is for adults (18+).