Privacy Policy

01Who we are

Roadbuds is operated by MindMarvelous LLC ("we", "us"). This policy covers the Roadbuds mobile app and roadbuds.app. By using Roadbuds you agree to the handling of information described here.

02What we collect

Information you give us

• Account — email address, username, and password.
• Date of birth — collected when you sign up, to confirm you meet the minimum age in section 11. We keep the date itself so that the check does not have to be repeated and so an account cannot be aged up after the fact.
• School — if you choose to add one, the college or university you attend and your year. Both are optional, both are public on your profile, and you can clear them at any time.
• Profile — display name, city and bio, if you choose to add them. All three are optional.
• Vehicle — the make, model, year, colour and type of the car you drive, plus any photos you submit to verify it.
• Messages — the text of messages you send to other drivers. Roadbuds messaging is plain text only; you cannot send photos or share your location in a message.
• Reports — if you report a user, a vehicle or a conversation, we keep what you submitted and the reason you gave.

Information created by using the app

• Location — see section 3. This is the most sensitive thing we hold and it gets its own section.
• Encounters — a record of which other Roadbuds drivers you have passed, when, and roughly where. The location is part of the record and is kept with it; see section 3.
• Gameplay — XP, medals, streaks, daily check-ins, and which CarDex entries you have unlocked.
• Social graph — who you have added, who has added you, and who you have blocked.
• Invites — your invite code and, if you joined through one, which account invited you.

Information from your device

• Push token — an anonymous identifier issued by Apple or Google that lets us send you a notification, plus which of the two platforms you are on. Only stored if you turn notifications on.

03Location, in detail

Roadbuds needs your location to do the one thing it does: notice that you and another driver were on the same stretch of road. Here is precisely how that works.

We only record you while you are moving

Your device reports its position and speed to us while the app determines you are driving. When your speed drops below the driving threshold, we stop advancing your stored position. Your last recorded position stays frozen at wherever you were while still moving, and that frozen point — not your live position — is what any map view is built from. Arriving somewhere and parking does not write your destination to our servers.

Passing someone writes down where it happened

This is the exception to everything above, and it is the part worth reading twice. When you and another driver pass each other, that encounter is saved to both of your CarDex records — and the position where it happened is saved with it. Encounters are kept for as long as your account exists, because your collection is the record of what you passed. So while we do not track your route or store where you parked, the set of your encounters does amount to a history of places you have driven past other Roadbuds users.

Two things follow from that, and we would rather say them plainly than let you find out later. The first is that this data is used: if you add a school to your profile, we confirm the affiliation by checking whether your existing encounters put you on or near that campus on at least three separate days. Nothing extra is recorded to do it — the check reads encounters you had already logged, which is also why it can recognise driving you did before you ever set a school. The second is that deleting your account deletes these rows along with everything else.

Sharing is off until you switch it on

Every new account starts with map sharing set to off. Nobody can see your position at all. If you turn it on, you choose between sharing with all of your friends or with a list of friends you select individually. You can change this or switch it back off at any time in Settings.

Private zones

You can define circular private zones anywhere on the map, each with its own label and radius. While your frozen position falls inside one of your zones, you are removed from other people's maps entirely — not approximated, not offset, simply absent.

Distance floors for people who are not your friends

Drivers who are not your friends are subject to a minimum distance before you appear to them at all. A friend-of-a-friend must be at least 50 miles away, and anyone in the wider network at least 200 miles. This is deliberately inverted from a normal proximity feature: the further someone is from you, the more likely they are to see you. The effect is that people outside your friends can see that Roadbuds is being played elsewhere in the country, and can never use the map to work out where you are.

Appearing to the wider network at all is a separate setting, and it is off by default.

04How we use it

• To detect that you passed another driver, and to award the resulting unlock and XP.
• To run the game — CarDex progress, streaks, medals and levels.
• To show you on the map to the people you have chosen to share with.
• To deliver messages between you and drivers you have both added.
• To send push notifications you have enabled, for messages, friend activity and CarDex unlocks. Each of the three can be turned off separately.
• To keep the service safe — reviewing reports, enforcing our Terms, and preventing abuse.
• To fix problems, and to understand and improve how the app performs.

05What other people can see

Other Roadbuds users can see:

• Your username, display name, city, bio and profile picture, if you set them.
• Your active vehicle — its make, model, year and colour.
• Your level, XP, medals and CarDex progress.
• Your school and year, if you added them.
• Your Roadbuds plate number, shown to drivers who can see your real name. It is simply the order you joined in — it is not a vehicle registration plate, and we never ask for or store your real one.
• Your frozen map position — but only if you have turned map sharing on, only if they fall within the audience you chose, and never inside one of your private zones.

Other users never see your email address, your password, your live position, your precise speed, the boundaries of your private zones, your conversations with anyone else, or the verification photos you submit for a vehicle. Verification photos exist only to confirm you drive the car you registered; they are visible to you and, if a vehicle is reported, to a moderator reviewing it. They are never shown to other users.

06Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small number of service providers to run the app, and they only receive what they need to perform their function:

• Railway — hosts our servers and database in the United States. All of the data described in this policy is stored there.
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your device and distributes app updates. Receives your push token and the notification content.
• Cloudinary — hosts the reference images used in the CarDex catalogue, and images uploaded through the app.
• Apple and Google — operate the push notification services your device receives notifications through, and distribute the app itself.
• PostHog — product analytics we use to understand how the app is actually used in aggregate (which features get used, where people run into trouble in a flow) so we can improve it. Receives event names (e.g. "vehicle added") and your internal account ID — never your email, password, or location, and we do not use it for advertising.
• Sentry — crash reporting. If the app crashes or hits an unexpected error, Sentry receives a technical report of what went wrong: the error, where in the code it happened, your device model and OS version, and the app version. That is what makes a crash fixable rather than invisible. It is configured not to collect personal information — no IP address, no account ID, no email, no location — and it does not record your screen. Reports are only sent from the released app, not while we are developing it.
• Anthropic — when you submit the two photos to verify a vehicle, those photos are sent to Anthropic's Claude API for an automated second opinion on whether they show the car you say they do. It receives the two photos and nothing else — no name, no account details, no location. The result is a note visible only to us, and it decides nothing on its own: a vehicle is never approved or rejected by it, and a badly lit photo cannot lock you out of your own car. No other image you upload is sent there, and no part of Roadbuds generates content with it.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect the safety of a person or the integrity of the service.

This website

Everything above is about the app. This site — roadbuds.app — is a separate thing, and it loads a few files from other companies to render the page you are reading. It sets no cookies of its own and has no login, but those companies see the request, which means your IP address and browser. In full:

• Mapbox — the street maps on the home page and in the privacy section. The interactive one uses Mapbox's own library, which stores a random identifier in your browser under mapbox.eventData and reports map usage back to them. It is not tied to any account, because this site has none, and we cannot turn it off without breaking their terms — but it is a third-party identifier on your device and you should know it is there. Clearing site data removes it.
• Cloudflare — hosts the site, and its Web Analytics counts page views. It is cookieless and does not fingerprint or follow you to other sites.
• Cloudinary — the car photographs.
• Google Fonts — the two typefaces.
• jsDelivr and cdnjs — the graphics libraries behind the animated sections.

That is the whole list. There is no advertising, no tag manager, no session recording and no social embed anywhere on this site.

07What we do not do

This section is here because it is easier to verify than a promise. As of the effective date above, the Roadbuds app contains:

• No advertising SDK, and no advertising identifiers.
• No cross-app or cross-site tracking.
• No screen recording or session replay.
• No sale or rental of personal information to anyone, for any purpose.
• No data broker relationships.

We do use a product analytics tool (PostHog) to see which features get used and where people run into trouble in the app — see Section 6 for exactly what it receives.

If this changes, we will update this section and tell you before the change takes effect.

08How long we keep it

• Account and profile — for as long as your account exists.
• Live and frozen position — one of each per account, each overwritten by the next update. No history of these two is kept: we cannot reconstruct the route you took today, and parking somewhere never writes that destination down.
• Proximity records — deleted automatically about four hours after they are written. While you are driving, the app keeps a short-lived note of which other users were near you, so the "passed by" list on your screen can exist at all. Kept longer, that table would become a movement log for everyone; a background job deletes each row once it is too old to still be on anyone's screen.
• Encounters — kept for as long as your account exists, as part of your CarDex record, since your collection is a record of what you passed. Each one carries the position where it happened, so this is the one place a history of where you have driven does accumulate. Section 3 explains what it is used for.
• Messages — deleted 24 hours after they are sent. Either person in a conversation can save a message to keep it; a saved message is shown as saved to both of you, and is kept until it is unsaved, the conversation is deleted, or the account is deleted.
• Reported conversations — if you report a conversation, a copy of its recent messages is stored with that report so a moderator can review what was actually said. Without it, a report made about a message would have nothing left to review by the time it was looked at. This copy is kept with the report.
• Reports and blocks — kept after the fact so that a blocked person stays blocked and repeat reports can be identified.

09Your rights and controls

In the app you can, at any time:

• Edit or clear your display name, city, bio and vehicle.
• Turn map sharing off entirely, or change who it is shared with.
• Add, edit or remove private zones.
• Turn off each category of push notification.
• Block another user, which removes you from each other's app.
• Delete your account.

Deleting your account removes your profile from other users and stops all collection of new information about you. Contact us at hello@roadbuds.app to request a copy of your data or its permanent erasure, and we will respond within 30 days.

Depending on where you live you may have additional rights — including access, correction, deletion, portability, and the right to object to certain processing. We apply the rights described in this section to everyone regardless of location. Residents of the EEA and UK may also lodge a complaint with their local data protection authority.

10Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt before they are stored; we cannot read your password and cannot recover it for you. Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Access to the production database is restricted to the operator of the service.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and any regulator we are required to notify.

11Children

You must be at least 16 to use Roadbuds. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up and refuse the account if it does not meet that age. Sixteen rather than thirteen because Roadbuds is a game about driving, and that is the licence age in most US states.

Roadbuds is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe an underage person has created an account, contact us at hello@roadbuds.app and we will delete it.

12Changes and contact

If we change this policy we will update the effective date at the top, and for any material change we will notify you in the app before it takes effect.

Questions, requests or complaints about privacy:
hello@roadbuds.app
MindMarvelous LLC