Shadehopper Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Shadehopper LLC ("Shadehopper," "we," "us") operates the Shadehopper app and website at shadehopper.com. This policy explains what data the Shadehopper mobile app and website collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and how you can see or delete it.

2. What we collect

Shadehopper collects the nine categories of data listed below and nothing else. Every category is linked to your account, because the app is built around a signed-in profile. None of it is collected for tracking purposes, and none of it is used to follow you across other companies' apps or websites.

• Email address. Collected when you create an account or sign in, whether by email and password, Google, or Sign in with Apple. We use it to identify your account, to contact you about your account, and to attach your email to any feedback you send us. Sign in with Apple also offers us your name; we ask for it, then discard it, and no name is ever stored.
• User ID. A Firebase user identifier generated when your account is created. It is the key that ties every other record in this list to you.
• Device push token. If you turn on notifications, your device's push token (Apple Push Notification service, delivered through Firebase Cloud Messaging) is stored so we can send the notifications you asked for.
• Precise location. With your permission, Shadehopper uses your device's precise and approximate location to compute real-time shadows, a UV index corrected for your altitude, air quality, shade-optimized walking routes, and turn-by-turn walking navigation. Most of this is momentary: coordinates sent while planning a route, scoring shade, or checking conditions are used to answer that request and are not written to our database. Location is stored, and linked to your account, only when you choose to save something: a favorite spot, a saved workout route (which keeps the full path), a saved place, or a place rating. Separately, if you grant the "Allow all the time" permission, Shadehopper reads your location in the background, including when the app is closed or your screen is locked, so navigation can keep running and can tell you out loud when you leave your route. Background location is used only during an active navigation session and it never leaves your device: the navigation code on your phone reads it and does not send it to our servers. You can turn it off at any time in your device's system settings, and foreground navigation still works without it.
• Health data. Your body weight, your Fitzpatrick skin-tone setting, and your age. Each is optional and entered by you. Weight drives calorie estimates, skin tone personalizes vitamin D timing and burn-time warnings, and age refines those calculations. These are stored with your account on our servers, not only on your device.
• Fitness data. Your saved workout routes and their activity type, distance, calories, and elevation gain; your current streak, longest streak, and earned badges; and any activity goals you set.
• Usage data. Counters that record how much you use the app: number of sessions, the dates you were active, when you were last active, and how many routes, loops, workouts, and shade lookups you have run this month. We use these to apply plan limits and to power streaks. They live in our own database and are not sent to any analytics service.
• User content you write. The names you give favorite spots and saved routes, and the notes you attach to a place rating.
• Support content. When you send feedback, we store your message, your rating, your email address, and the app context at that moment (such as the UV index and shade score on screen) so we can understand and reply to the report.

3. What we do not do

• No advertising. Shadehopper contains no advertising, no ad network, and no advertising SDK. We do not use the device advertising identifier (IDFA), and the app never asks for permission to track you, because it has nothing to track you with.
• No analytics or tracking SDKs. Shadehopper ships no third-party analytics, attribution, or crash-reporting SDK. Google Analytics for Firebase is not enabled in the app, and there is no Crashlytics, Sentry, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or Segment.
• We do not sell your personal data.
• We do not share your personal data with data brokers.
• We do not track you across other companies' apps or websites, and we do not combine your data with data from other companies for that purpose.
• We do not collect payment card details. Shadehopper does not process payments today. If that changes, payment handling will go to a third-party payment processor and we still will not store card numbers.
• We do not collect your name, phone number, postal address, contacts, photos, browsing history, or audio.

4. Third-party services

We use the following service providers, who process data on our behalf:

• Firebase (Google): account authentication, our database, and push notification delivery
• OpenStreetMap and the Overpass API: building, street, and tree canopy data used to compute shade
• Open-Meteo: weather, UV, and air quality forecasts
• WeatherAPI.com: current weather and UV conditions
• OpenRouteService (HeiGIT): walking route calculation
• Open-Elevation: ground elevation, used to correct the UV index for altitude
• HERE Technologies: place results for the location search box
• OpenFreeMap: base map tiles
• Cloudflare: our map tile cache and proxy
• Vercel and Render: hosting for the website and the API
• Apple: Sign in with Apple, and push notification delivery through APNs

Apart from Firebase and Apple, which hold your account itself, these providers receive only coordinates, a map area, or a tile request, together with our own API key. They do not receive your email address, user ID, weight, age, or skin tone.

Two features hand your location to a company we do not control, and only at the moment you ask for them. When you search for a place, the text you type and your approximate location go to HERE Technologies so it can return matching place results, processed under HERE's terms. When you tap a ride-hailing option, the pickup coordinates, the destination coordinates, and any destination label are passed to the ride-share app you chose, such as Uber, Lyft, Bolt, Grab, Careem, Ola, Cabify, InDriver, or DiDi, so that app can start the ride request. Once your data reaches that company, its own privacy policy governs it.

5. Data retention

Account data is kept until you delete your account. Coordinates used for live navigation, one-off route planning, shade scoring, and weather lookups are not retained on our servers after your session ends. Anything you explicitly save stays until you delete it or delete your account.

6. Your rights: access and deletion

You can see the profile data we hold from the Profile tab in the app, and you can ask us for a copy at any time by emailing contact@shadehopper.com.

You can delete your account and its data yourself: open the Profile tab and choose "Delete account." The request is processed on our servers immediately, and it removes your profile (including weight, skin tone, and age), your saved routes, saved places, favorites, goals, streaks and badges, usage counters, and your sign-in credentials.

One exception, so it is not a surprise: place ratings you submitted stay on Shadehopper in anonymized form, so the shade averages other people rely on do not disappear. Before your account is removed we strip the rating of everything personal, including your user ID and any note you wrote, and move it to a new record with no link back to you.

You can also request deletion by emailing contact@shadehopper.com, or follow the steps at shadehopper.com/delete-account.html.

7. Children

Shadehopper is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13.

8. Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. We will tell you about material changes through the app or by email.

9. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Contact us at contact@shadehopper.com.