Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 14, 2026

1. What Information Do We Collect?

In Short: We collect information you provide to us and information generated by your use of the app.

Information you provide:

• Name and email address, when you create an account. Your email address is held by our sign-in service (Firebase Authentication) and is never shown to other riders.
• Profile photo (optional)
• Your bikes: name, brand, model and type, components and service history, and for e-bikes the motor and battery details
• Optional profile details: date of birth, weight, maximum heart rate, riding goals and experience level, annual distance goals, helmets and their purchase dates, and names you give your routes. Date of birth and maximum heart rate set your effort zones; weight is used to estimate calories. These details are stored with your account, where other riders can't read them (see Section 3); they are deleted when you delete your account, and never sold or used for advertising.
• Settings: display name, privacy setting, units, and notification preferences, including quiet hours and your time zone
• Routes you plan in the route builder

Information collected automatically:

• Precise location (GPS) while you record a ride, including while the screen is off, until you end the ride. Each ride stores its route as a series of points, each with a time, elevation, speed and heart rate, plus a code for the area where the ride started (about 40 m across).
• Approximate location for the weather on the Home screen, if you have already allowed location access. It is rounded to about 1 km before it leaves your iPhone.
• Ride metrics: distance, duration, elevation, speed, calories and heart rate
• Apple Watch: when you record on Apple Watch, the Watch records your location, heart rate and calories and sends the ride to your iPhone
• For push notifications: a push token, your device platform, whether notifications are allowed, and the app version
• For crash reports: device type, operating system version and crash details

Apple Health (HealthKit): With your permission, Crankd reads these types from Apple Health: heart rate (live during rides), resting heart rate, date of birth, and workouts, with each workout's distance and active energy. After setup, Crankd asks for resting heart rate and date of birth; you can decline.

• Date of birth read from Apple Health is used on your iPhone only and is never stored on our servers.
• Your resting heart rate is stored with your account in a zone profile (maximum heart rate, resting heart rate, and how the maximum was determined), so the app and Crankd Coach use the same effort zones.
• Workout import: if Apple Health lets Crankd read workouts, Crankd copies to your account the cycling workouts that other apps recorded in the last 90 days — activity type, start and end time, duration, distance, active calories, and the name of the app that recorded it — and checks for new ones about once a day. It also stores a summary of what it found (counts and dates, not the workouts themselves). Imported workouts are used only for Crankd Coach.
• When you save a ride on iPhone, Crankd writes it to Apple Health as a cycling workout with its distance and estimated active energy, together with the heart-rate samples recorded during the ride. Rides recorded on Apple Watch are saved to Apple Health by the Watch.

You can change or revoke this access at any time in the Health app or under iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Health. We do not store Apple Health data in iCloud, and we never use it for advertising or sell it.

Subscriptions: Crankd Pro is sold and billed by Apple through the App Store; we never receive your card or payment details. To unlock Crankd Pro, we keep your plan, subscription status, and trial and renewal dates with your account, and Apple's transaction identifiers in a record only you can read. Apple also sends us a notice when a subscription starts, renews, lapses, is refunded or enters a billing grace period. For each notice we record its type, what we did with it and, when it matches an account, that account's user ID.

Third-party sign-in: If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive your name and email address from that provider (with Apple, this may be a private relay address), and from Google your profile photo.

2. How Do We Process Your Information?

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and personalize Crankd.

• To create and manage your account
• To record, store, display, and replay your rides
• To show your profile and rides to other riders according to your privacy setting, and to run rider search, following, and likes
• To track component wear across your bikes
• To generate AI ride analysis (Crankd Coach readings and weekly digests, Crankd Pro only)
• To show current weather on the Home screen
• To verify and manage your subscription (purchased through Apple's App Store)
• To send the notifications you have turned on, such as likes, follows, follow requests, and your weekly digest
• To improve app stability and fix bugs via crash reporting
• To comply with legal obligations

3. When and With Whom Do We Share Your Information?

In Short: Other Crankd riders see what your privacy setting allows. We share information only with the service providers needed to run Crankd. We do not sell your data.

What other Crankd riders can see. Your privacy setting (Private, Friends, or Public) controls who can see your public profile and your rides. Riders who already follow you keep their access if you later switch to Private.

Your public profile. Other riders see your display name, profile photo, privacy setting, ride count and total distance, and when any of these last changed. If your profile is set to Friends or Public, any signed-in Crankd rider can see them, and riders who follow you can see them whatever your setting.

The rest of your account. Apart from your rides, follows, and likes (below), the rest of your account is readable only by you: your date of birth, weight, and heart-rate details; your units, goals, helmets, and route names; your Apple Health choices; your notification settings and subscription details; and your email address, Apple transaction identifiers, imported workouts, bikes, planned routes, notifications, and device registrations. Other riders never see your date of birth or weight. A Crankd Coach reading on a ride they can see may mention your goals or heart-rate figures.

Your rides. If your profile is Public, any signed-in rider can see your rides; if it is Friends, riders you have approved as followers can; if it is Private, only you — and riders who already follow you — can. A ride others can see includes its full route (every GPS point with its time, elevation, speed, and heart rate), its stats and title, the bike type and surface, the area code where it started, the planned route it followed, and any Crankd Coach reading. Riders who can see a ride can like it, and a ride's likes show who liked it.

Finding and following. If your profile is Friends or Public, other riders can find you by name in rider search. Your follower and following lists are visible to you, to your followers, and, if your profile is Public, to any signed-in rider; any signed-in rider can check whether one particular rider follows another. When you ask to follow someone, they see your name and photo with the request; when you follow a rider or like one of their rides, they may get a notification with your name, whatever your privacy setting.

Service providers we use:

• Firebase (Google) — sign-in, database, file storage, server functions, crash reporting (Crashlytics), app integrity checks (App Check), and push-notification delivery (Firebase Cloud Messaging)
• Apple — App Store purchases, billing, and subscription notices; push-notification delivery; and current weather through Apple WeatherKit, which receives only the center of an area about 5 km across, never your account details
• Mapbox — map rendering and route visualization; route coordinates are sent to render maps, and the route builder sends the points you tap so Mapbox can plan the route. The Mapbox Maps SDK can also collect anonymized telemetry (approximate location, device type, and map-usage data, never linked to your Crankd account) to improve its maps. From Crankd 1.0.9 it's off unless you turn it on: tap the ⓘ information button in the bottom-left corner of any map, then Mapbox Telemetry. You can turn it off again the same way. See Mapbox's Privacy Policy for details
• Google Maps Platform — static map images: the ride summary map sends the ride's route line and its start and finish points, and share cards send the map's center. When a ride has no route, such as an indoor ride, the summary map sends your phone's current position instead. The app also downloads a typeface from Google Fonts.
• Anthropic — AI ride analysis for Crankd Coach (Crankd Pro only). For each ride reading we send the ride's distance, duration, elevation, speed, surface, average heart rate, and heart-rate-zone minutes; your maximum heart rate (estimated from your age if you haven't set it, or 185 bpm if we don't know your age, and raised if your rides show a higher one) and resting heart rate, and how they were determined; the dates, distances, durations, and climbing of your last five rides; your riding goals; for e-bikes, the motor and battery details; and a summary of your imported Apple Health workouts (count, total distance, and total calories). For the weekly digest we send each ride's date, bike and surface type, distance, duration, climbing, average speed, and average and maximum heart rate, plus your ride count and distance over the past 30 days. Anthropic never receives your location, GPS points, name, or email address. This data is not used to train models.

Push notifications — for example another rider's name, or the first lines of your weekly digest — pass through Google and Apple to reach your device.

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to third parties.

4. Do We Use Cookies and Tracking Technologies?

Crankd is a mobile app and does not use browser cookies. We do not use analytics SDKs or advertising trackers, and we do not track you across other apps or websites. We use Firebase Crashlytics to collect crash and stability diagnostics so we can fix bugs; this is used only to improve app stability.

5. How Long Do We Keep Your Information?

• Account data — retained as long as your account is active
• Ride data — retained as long as your account is active or until you delete individual rides
• GPS data — stored as part of your ride records in Firebase, used to record and display your rides. Other riders can see it as described in Section 3, and route coordinates are sent to our mapping providers (see Section 3) to render maps. We do not sell your location data or use it for advertising.
• On your iPhone — Crankd keeps a copy of every ride it records (each GPS point with its location, elevation, speed, and heart rate, plus the ride's totals) in a database on your iPhone. In the current version this copy is not removed when you delete a ride, sign out, or delete your account; deleting the app removes it. The app also keeps an offline copy of data it has loaded.
• Push registrations — kept until you sign out or delete your account, or until the push token stops working
• Notifications — your in-app notifications are kept until you delete your account
• Subscription records — your plan and status stay with your account while it exists, and Apple's transaction identifiers are deleted with your account. Our log of Apple's subscription notices is kept after you delete your account, as billing records.
• Weather — current conditions are cached by area and contain nothing about you
• Crash logs — retained for 90 days

6. How Do We Keep Your Information Safe?

We use Firebase Security Rules to control who can read each record. Your account details and settings, bikes, planned routes, imported workouts, notifications, device registrations, weekly digests, and billing identifiers are readable only by you. Your public profile and your rides are readable by other riders as described in Section 3. All data is transmitted over HTTPS. Subscription billing is handled entirely by Apple's App Store, and we never see or store card numbers. We use Firebase App Check to help prevent unauthorized access to our backend services.

7. Do We Collect Information from Minors?

Crankd is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us personal information, please contact us at support@vortraapp.com and we will delete it.

8. What Are Your Privacy Rights?

Depending on your location, you may have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate information
• Request deletion of your account and personal data
• Export your ride data
• Withdraw consent for optional data processing

To exercise these rights, contact us at support@vortraapp.com. You can also delete your account directly from the app under Profile → Delete account.

9. Controls for Do-Not-Track Features

Most mobile operating systems offer privacy controls that limit tracking. Crankd respects iOS privacy settings. We do not track you across third-party apps or websites.

10. US State Privacy Rights

If you are a California resident, Colorado resident, or resident of another US state with applicable privacy laws, you have additional rights regarding your personal information.

We have not sold personal information to third parties. To exercise your state privacy rights, contact us at support@vortraapp.com.

11. Do We Make Updates to This Notice?

Yes. We will update this Privacy Policy as needed to stay compliant with relevant laws and to reflect changes in our practices. When it changes, we'll update this page and its date.

12. How Can You Contact Us?

Vortra LLC
4539 N 22nd St
Phoenix, AZ 85016
United States
support@vortraapp.com

13. How Can You Review or Delete Your Data?

You can delete your account and personal data directly in the app under Profile → Delete account. Deleting your account permanently removes your profile, rides, bikes, planned routes, imported health data, coaching history, notifications, device registrations, and social activity (follows, follow requests, and likes) from our systems. Our log of Apple's subscription notices is kept after deletion as billing records (see Section 5). Residual copies may persist temporarily in routine backup cycles before being purged. Crash diagnostics expire on their normal 90-day cycle. Deleting your account does not remove the ride copies stored on your iPhone (see Section 5); delete the app to remove them. For data export requests or other inquiries, contact us at support@vortraapp.com.