Privacy, safety and your data

What we collect

Your account (email, display name, an optional avatar). The cars you add, including tyre class, drivetrain, power and weight — these exist because the coaching is computed from them. The roads you build, and for each run: the GPS trace, its timestamps, its accuracy, and the lap time the server derives from it.

While a run is recording we also read your phone’s motion sensors — the accelerometer and gyroscope, about twenty-five times a second. A GPS fix arrives roughly once a second, which is too slow to describe a braking or a corner; the motion sensors are what resolve the moment in between. They are stored with that run and they stop the instant the run does.

A trace is stored as one row of parallel arrays, not a row per fix, and it is only ever read whole. We do not collect contacts, advertising identifiers, or location while you are not recording.

Who can see it

Access is enforced by the database, not by the app. Profiles, published roads, lap times and leaderboards are public. Your raw trace is not: it is readable by you, and — on a route you have both driven — by a Plus subscriber for the ghost car and gap comparison. A draft road is visible to nobody but you.

Road insights, and the switch that controls them

There is one thing Sterza would like to do with your driving that it does not need to do to work, so it is the one thing we ask about separately. Combined across many drivers, drives describe roads rather than people: which roads get driven, how fast traffic actually moves on them, where drivers brake. We intend to publish and to license those statistics.

That is a different purpose from timing your laps, so it gets its own consent rather than a line buried in the terms. The switch is in the app under Profile → Data & privacy, it is off until you turn it on, and turning it down costs you nothing — timing, coaching, leaderboards, the ghost car and your own history are identical either way.

You can withdraw at any time with the same switch, and it stops applying to everything recorded from that moment. Statistics already published cannot be withdrawn — they no longer contain anything traceable to you, which is the same reason they cannot be unpicked to remove one driver. We would rather say that plainly here than discover you assumed otherwise.

What we never do

• We do not sell your data. We do not hand your GPS trace to an advertiser, insurer, data broker or marketplace — not anonymised, not pseudonymised, not under any arrangement. A trace is not a thing we will ever sell, because the ends of your journeys identify you however much is stripped from the middle.

• We do not send a notification telling you your time has been beaten on a public road. A leaderboard is passive; a notification is a summons.

• We do not put personal data in crash reports. Request breadcrumbs are stripped to a status code, because our own URLs carry track and run identifiers.

• We do not track your location in the background. Recording is explicit, foreground, and visible while it runs.

Safety on public roads

Sterza’s roads are real roads with real traffic on them. Four things follow from that, and all four are enforced in the product rather than stated here as sentiment. The safety position sets them out in full.

Some of what this app enables is restricted in certain jurisdictions. Nothing here is legal advice, and driving within the law remains yours.

Third parties

Map tiles and road-snapping are served by our map provider; a road you draw is sent to be matched to a centreline, and nothing about you goes with it. Coaching prose is generated from a few hundred bytes of derived numbers — corner angles, tenths lost — and never from a trace. Sign-in and storage run on our hosting provider. Crash reporting is optional and off unless it is switched on for a build.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Two purposes, on two different footings, which is exactly why one of them has a switch and the other does not.

Raw traces and motion samples are kept while the run they belong to exists. Delete a run and they go with it; delete your account and everything held against it goes, subject to the note about other drivers’ times below.

Your rights

You can export every run, trace and motion recording we hold for you, delete an individual run, withdraw your consent to road insights, or delete the account entirely. A published road that other drivers have times on is not deleted with the account — the times belong to them — but it is unlinked from your identity. Requests go to privacy@sterza.app and are answered within 30 days.

Children and eligibility

Sterza is for licensed drivers and is not offered to anyone under [16]. We do not knowingly hold data from a child; if you believe we do, write to us and it will be removed.