Privacy Policy — Solitary Labs

The short version

RideScore measures how rough the water is and how a boat rides in it.
There is no account, no name and no password. Your phone gets an anonymous identity the first time you open the app. You can optionally add Sign in with Apple so the same account comes back on a new phone; that is the only way the app ever gives us an email address, and Apple lets you hide yours behind a relay. Installing the app never puts you on a mailing list. The website's forms, and the RideScore updates list you can choose to join, are separate and described below.
Our sign-in service keeps, with your account, the IP address your phone last connected from and the app and iOS versions it reported. It is there to keep the service secure, not to find you, and we erase it once the app has gone seven days without renewing its sign-in.
When you record a ride, it is shared. Its motion and position data is uploaded to our servers, where it feeds our own research into how boats ride, and will build the shared conditions map when that is switched on. That is the trade the app is built on. The map in the app today is computed from public weather data, not from anyone's rides.
If you do not want a ride shared, do not record it. Your boat profiles and their BoatScores work without recording. So do the forecast, the map and every Helm page.
RideScore is a subscription; new subscribers get the first month free on either plan.
Don't record anywhere you don't want uploaded, like your dock or your fishing spots.
Every GPS point is deleted within 90 days. Everything else about the ride is kept, with no location in it, to rate boats and improve forecasts.
We also keep long-term summaries of boat traffic and water conditions by area and by hour or type of day, only where several boats have been, never tied to any ride, boat or account.
Saved points live on your phone and in your own iCloud account. We hold nothing about them unless you switch on an alert for one.
Your rides and your boats are kept in your own iCloud account too, like your saved points, so they come back when you reinstall the app or change phones. That copy is yours: it sits in your private iCloud database, we cannot read it, and it never passes through our servers.
We may sell data built from many users' rides: statistics, aggregated and anonymized. We never sell your ride, your track, or your location.
When the shared map is switched on it will show water conditions in grid cells only, and only where several boats have been — never boats, tracks, dots, or people.
This website counts its own page views. It also tells Meta (Facebook) when you visit, so we can show RideScore ads to people who have already looked at it. You can turn that off on this page, under This website, and if your browser sends Global Privacy Control, it is off automatically.

Who we are

RideScore is made by Solitary Labs LLC, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, USA. We are the controller of the data described here. When this policy says "our servers" it means the systems we operate for RideScore: a database, accounts, file storage and server functions hosted at Supabase; forecast data stored and delivered from Cloudflare; and the machines that compute the forecasts, which we operate. Those providers host it; we control what is stored and who can read it, and they are listed under Who processes your data. We are not part of any boat manufacturer, dealer, insurer, or marine electronics company.

Privacy questions, and requests for a copy of your data or its deletion, go through the contact form.

This website

solitarylabs.com is a handful of static pages. There is no login and no comment box. There are three forms, a page counter and an advertising pixel, and this is all they do.

The page counter. When a page loads, your browser tells our own server which page it is, the page you came from if there was one, your screen width, and, when you leave, how many seconds the page was visible. The server adds the country and state Cloudflare reports for the connection and a one-day visitor number made by hashing the connection's network address and browser description with a secret that changes daily, so the number cannot be turned back into an address and does not carry over to the next day. The network address itself is not stored. No cookie is set, nothing is stored in your browser, no third party receives anything, and if your browser sends Do Not Track the counter sends nothing at all. We use the counts to see which pages and which of our own ads are worth the effort.
The contact form and the beta application. What you type in them (your email address; your name and message if you give them; and for the beta your boat, mount and where you run) is stored in a database at Cloudflare that only Solitary Labs can read, together with the time and the network address it was sent from, which is used only to stop floods of automated submissions, and, if you arrived from one of our own ads, a short tag naming that ad so we can tell which ads work. It is used to answer you and, for the beta, to run the program. It is not shared with anyone. A contact message is deleted once it is answered and closed; a beta application is kept while you are in the program or on its list. Any of it is deleted on request. The forms set no cookie and load no third-party script.
The RideScore updates list. This is the one mailing list we keep, and you join it only by choosing to: the “tell me when it’s on the App Store” form, the updates box on the contact and beta forms, or, when the app offers it, a switch inside the app. Installing the app never adds you. On the list we hold your email address and when and where you joined, at Cloudflare, and we use it to tell you when RideScore reaches the App Store and to send occasional RideScore news from Solitary Labs. It is never sold, rented or shared. Every email carries an unsubscribe link; unsubscribing removes your address, and you can also ask through the contact form.
Advertising (Meta Pixel). Our pages load the Meta Pixel from Meta. It tells Meta which page you viewed and when, along with your browser, your network address and Meta's own cookie identifiers. We use it to measure our Facebook ads and to show RideScore ads to people who have visited. We send Meta no name, email address or form contents, and the pixel is not on the pages you see after sending a form. Meta's own use is governed by Meta's privacy policy.
Your choices. The switch below turns the pixel off for your browser. Your choice is remembered in a first-party cookie. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, we treat that as the same choice and the pixel never loads. The page counter keeps working either way, and it never shares anything.
Cookies. The site's own cookie is your opt-out choice, if you make one. Meta's pixel sets Meta's cookies unless you have opted out.
Third parties. Meta, for the pixel. The typefaces and everything else are served from this domain.
Hosting. The pages are served by Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare necessarily processes your IP address and request in order to deliver the page, and keeps short-lived operational and security logs. We do not add anything to that, and we do not build a profile from it.

RideScore is not an always-on tracker

Your position reaches us in four situations and no others.

While you are recording a ride.
When you switch on an alert for a spot, so we can check the forecast there. We hold that spot's exact position while the alert is on, and your time zone, so alerts keep to your quiet hours.
When you ask what the water is doing somewhere, the place you asked about is sent so we can answer. We do not keep it. The Helm shows the forecast for the water you are on, at any speed and whether or not you are recording. It reads that forecast from what is already downloaded to your phone. Only when your phone has none for the water you are on does the Helm ask our forecast service, with your exact position: when it opens, when you move into a new patch of water about six miles across, when the hour changes, or when you change boats — and during a recording, whether or not the screen is on. If a request fails it waits before trying again, and it does not try without a connection. We do not keep that either.
When the app downloads forecast and water-map data for the area around you — including keeping the forecast on your phone for when you lose signal. It downloads the next 48 hours of forecast for the water within about 200 nautical miles of you, from our own forecast storage, which Cloudflare delivers. It does this when you open the app, when you open the Helm or start a recording, and from time to time while the app is running, including during a recording with the screen off. Those downloads name the squares of forecast they fetch, each about sixty miles on a side, so they show roughly where you are — the square you are in — never your exact position. They carry no account. It also refreshes the forecast for up to eight of your saved points in that area, which sends each point's position as described under Your saved points.
Otherwise the app reads your position only to show where you are and the forecast for the water you are on, and that does not come to us. While the Helm is open, and all through a recording, the phone reads the latest report from the nearest NOAA buoy, about once every half hour; that request goes to NOAA, not to us. Wind readings from weather stations come in one file that is the same for everyone and names no place, so it says nothing about where you are. To put a place name on the map, on a cell you tap, or on where a trip started and where it was roughest, the app asks Apple's own map service, and the map in a trip's report is Apple's too, so Apple receives those positions under Apple's privacy policy — we do not. Your saved spots live here and in your own iCloud; we hold nothing about them unless you switch on an alert for one.

Like any internet service, our servers also see the IP address your phone connects from, which can show roughly where you are. We do not use it to locate you; how long any of it is kept is set out below.

What the app collects on your phone

Motion sensors — accelerometer and gyroscope — while the Helm is open and during a ride you start. This is how the RideScore number is computed. With no ride recording, the readings only drive the Helm and are not saved; SET LEVEL stores just the phone's mounting angle for your boat.
Location: your position, speed and heading while the Forecast or the Helm is open, to show where you are and the forecast for the water you are on; and your GPS track, speed and heading during a ride you start. Recording continues in the background while a ride is running so you can put the phone down. With no ride recording, no track is saved. The app keeps two places on this phone: where you last left the map, and the rough place, to about six miles, that it last downloaded the forecast around.
Your boat profile: anything you enter — name, make, model, year, length, beam, dry weight, deadrise, hull form, stepped hull and step count, engines and horsepower, fuel capacity and fill, load, cruise speed, ride equipment, and how the phone is mounted and where.
Your rides: start and end time, distance, scores, and the raw sensor archive for the ride.

These live on your phone at full resolution, always.

Your rides — at full resolution — and your boats, with their mount and calibration, are also copied to your own iCloud account, so reinstalling the app or moving to a new phone brings them back. Apple keeps that copy in your private iCloud database under your Apple ID; we cannot read it, and it does not come to us. It counts against your iCloud storage. If you are not signed in to iCloud, nothing is copied and everything stays on this phone. Deleting a trip or a boat in the app deletes its iCloud copy. When you delete your account, you choose whether the app also deletes its copy in your iCloud. If you keep it, your rides, boats and saved spots stay in your iCloud and on this phone.

When you rate a ride

After some rides RideScore asks which word fits the roughest part of the trip, and which fits the calmest part you were moving. Answering is optional. Skip is one tap, next to the words, and skipping is remembered: two skips in a row and the asking stops for a while, three and it stops.
If you answer, we store these against that ride on our servers: the two words you chose; for each of the two three-minute stretches they describe, its measured score, its mean speed, what our forecast said for it at the speed you ran and at a standard cruising speed, and whether you had eased off the throttle; when you answered and why the app asked; and anything you type in the notes box.
No position travels with it. Each stretch is identified by how many seconds into the ride it was, and by nothing else.
The notes box is free text and it starts empty. Whatever you type there is stored against your ride like any other ride field, and we read it.
What the app works out about where your own line sits stays on your phone. It is never uploaded, and the only thing it changes is the alert score already filled in when you switch on an alert for a new spot — which you can still change.

When you look at the forecast

To draw the forecast we send the map area you are looking at — or the point you pinned — to our servers, along with the specifications of your boats (the point sheet sends your whole fleet so it can compare them). We use it to compute and return the forecast for that water. Your device also downloads background map tiles from OpenFreeMap and water and forecast tiles from our own storage; those requests carry the map area being viewed. The app also downloads the forecast for the water around you on its own, so it keeps working without signal; see RideScore is not an always-on tracker.

When the app crashes

If RideScore crashes, freezes, or is flagged by iOS for using too much processor time or writing too much to storage, iOS collects a diagnostic report and hands it to the app the next time you open it. We send that report to our own servers so we can fix what broke.

What is in it: the app version, the iOS version, your device model as iOS reports it ("iPhone17,1", not your phone's name), and the technical stack, exception codes and termination reason for where the code stopped.
What is not in it: no account identifier, no device or install identifier, no location, and nothing about which rides or spots you have. The report is not stored against your account, and nothing we store with it says whose phone it came from.
We use Apple's own MetricKit for this. There is no crash-reporting or analytics company involved.

One more thing the app sends about itself

When the app gets a point's forecast — when you open it, when the planner ranks your points, or when it refreshes your saved points in the background — it compares the number it got from our published forecast data against the number our server computes, and sends us the difference: the size of the disagreement, which forecast run and region it was checked against, a square about seventy miles on a side, how long our published data took to load and how much of it came over the network, and the same app, iOS and device-model facts as a crash report. No coordinate, no point name, no boat, no account identifier. It is how we check that the fast path is telling you the truth.

Your saved points

Points you save — a dock, a reef, a spot — are yours, and they are handled differently from everything else in this policy.

They are stored on your phone and in your own iCloud account (Apple's private database, which we cannot read). We hold nothing about a point on our servers unless you switch on an alert for it.
When you open a point's forecast, when the best-days planner ranks your favorite points, or when the app keeps the forecast for your saved points near you ready for use without signal, we send that point's position so we can compute a forecast for that water. We do not send the name you gave it, and nothing we store from that request carries your account.
If you turn on an alert for a spot, we store that spot's exact position on our server, with the alert's score and window and the details of the boat you picked for it (its make, model and measurements, never its name), so we can check the forecast there after each update. It is deleted when you turn the alert off, delete the spot, delete your account, or your subscription ends. Spots without an alert stay on your phone and in your iCloud.
While at least one alert is on, we also store your quiet hours and your phone's time zone against your account, so an alert does not arrive during them. They are deleted when you switch your last alert off or delete your account.
If you allow notifications, the token Apple issues for this phone is stored against your account so an alert can reach it. It is deleted when Apple reports it is no longer valid, or when you delete your account.

If you subscribe to RideScore

So that your subscription works on our servers (spot alerts are sent from there, and forecasts come from there), your phone and Apple send us Apple's signed record of your subscription, and your phone includes it with its forecast requests. We keep only what the subscription needs: Apple's number for the subscription, which plan it is (annual or monthly), whether it is a real purchase or an Apple test purchase, when the current period ends, and — only if they happen — when Apple refunded or revoked it and when a billing grace period ends, along with the times Apple signed those records, which is how we apply its updates in the right order. Apple's record also contains the price, currency and App Store country; we do not keep those. When you subscribe, the app gives Apple your RideScore account's random ID, so Apple's record can be matched to your account; it is not your name or your email.

If you came from an App Store ad

If you install RideScore after tapping one of our ads in the App Store, Apple tells the app which ad it was: the campaign, the search keyword and the date of the tap. Apple does not tell us who you are, and no advertising identifier or cross-app tracking is involved. We keep this with your anonymous account only to measure our own advertising. It is never sold, shared, or used to target you.

What leaves the phone when you record

Recording a ride uploads it.

While you record, live updates are sent as you go, and the complete recording uploads when the ride ends.
Also uploaded: one row per ride (start, end, app and algorithm version, your selected boat, how and where the phone was mounted), one row for each boat you record with (make, model, year and hull measurements — not the name you gave it), a copy of the ride's sensor archive — carrying your boat's profile, including its name, and your phone's model and iOS version — and a contributor-hours tally. From that archive our server also computes a ride study and the per-hit research record described below, both stored under your account. Your choice of units is kept with your account too, so it follows you to another phone.
Each ride saves the number of people aboard and the times you switched your stabilizers on or off.
Each boat gets a random code, kept with the boat in your iCloud and sent with every ride you record. It lets us tell one boat's rides from another's, so a make and model's ratings count each owner once.

What we do not collect

No name, no phone number, no password. The only optional sign-in is Sign in with Apple, and it gives us three things: an email address (your own or Apple's private relay), an account identifier Apple creates for our apps alone, and a token Apple issues to our app. We use the first two to find your account, and the token only to tell Apple to disconnect RideScore from your Apple ID when you delete your account. We never receive your Apple password or your name.
No contacts, photos, calendar, microphone, camera, or health data.
No advertising identifier, and no advertising or analytics SDK. The app contains exactly one third-party library, MapLibre, for drawing the map.
The app does no cross-app or cross-site tracking of any kind, and nothing the app collects is used for advertising, by us or by anyone else. (The website's ad pixel is described under This website, and you can switch it off.)
No card or payment details. Apple handles every RideScore purchase, and we never see your card.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

The RideScore app runs no third-party advertising, analytics or tracking code; its only ad measurement is Apple's own, for our App Store ads, described above. The Solitary Labs website runs one: the Meta Pixel, described under This website. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, or you switch it off on this page, the pixel never loads; Do Not Track also switches off the site's own page counter, as before. We do not sell personal information. The website shares visit data with Meta for advertising unless you opt out; what we sell is the aggregated statistics described in this policy.

What is ever shown publicly

The shared conditions map is not built yet. The map in the app today is computed from public weather data, not from anyone's rides. When the shared map is switched on it will render grid cells only, and only where several boats have been — no dots, no track lines, no names.
Full-resolution data is stored under your account, where no other user can read it. We read it: it feeds our own research and the accuracy of the forecast. It is never rendered on a shared surface. There is no research toggle; every ride is treated the same way. Our server does derive an internal research record from each ride's archive, holding the hard hits and how the boat was sitting when they happened; no app can read it, it is stored under your account, and deleting your account deletes it.

Aggregated statistics, and licensing

We may sell conditions and boat-ride statistics built from many users' rides to other companies. Always aggregated and anonymized. Never your individual rides, tracks, or precise location.

Statistics built from many users' rides — how rough given water is, how a given hull model rides in given conditions, and comparable fleet-scale figures — are the product of this whole exercise. We will show them in the app and publish them, and we may sell and license them to third parties. That is part of how this company makes money, and we say so plainly. What we license or publish is bounded, and the bounds are commitments, not preferences:

Aggregated and anonymized only. Nothing that identifies you, your account, your device, or your individual vessel.
Never individual rides or tracks. No track line, no ride record, no trip — yours or anyone's — leaves this company in any licensed or published output.
Never location finer than the coarse cell (roughly 5 nautical miles across). Precise position is never in a licensed output, for any ride, ever.
Never raw telemetry. Not your raw sensor archive, not the raw NMEA bus log, not the per-second series.
Never for advertising, ad measurement, or profiling of you.

How long we keep things

Every GPS point is deleted within 90 days. Everything else about the ride is kept, with no location in it, to rate boats and improve forecasts. We also keep long-term summaries of boat traffic and water conditions by area and by hour or type of day, only where several boats have been, never tied to any ride, boat or account. Your phone keeps its own full-resolution copy of every ride in the Trips tab, and nothing excludes it from your iPhone backup, so this does not take your recording away from you.
Your rides, tracks, station windows and studies are kept for as long as your account exists. The study is what the app actually reads, and it is a small fraction of the size of the archive it came from.
The internal research record is kept indefinitely. It is one row per hard hit, holding how rough that moment was and how the boat was sitting when it happened. Deleting your account still removes all of these rows.
Crash reports and the fast-path check rows are deleted after 90 days.
Request counts are deleted after two days. To keep one phone or one connection from overwhelming the service, our server counts how many requests and uploads each account makes, and how many come from each network, in short windows. A network is recorded as a shortened hash, not its address.
Sign-in records. The IP address and app and iOS versions kept with your sign-in are erased once the app has gone seven days without renewing it. The sign-in record itself is kept for as long as your account exists, because for an account without Sign in with Apple it is the only way your phone can reach it.
An alerted spot's position, and the record of alerts sent about it, are deleted the moment you turn the alert off or delete the spot, and when your subscription ends. Your quiet hours and time zone are deleted when you turn your last alert off.
Your subscription record is kept while your account exists and deleted with it. Deleting your account does not cancel the subscription: Apple keeps billing it until you cancel it in your Apple account's subscription settings.
Anonymous accounts that were never signed in with Apple, never recorded a ride, have no boats, and have been silent for twelve months are deleted.
When you delete your account, your rows and files are removed from our database and storage immediately. Copies in our backups expire within 30 days. When you delete your account, you choose whether the app also deletes its copy in your iCloud. If you keep it, your rides, boats and saved spots stay in your iCloud and on this phone.
Aggregated statistics are kept indefinitely. There is nothing personal in them.
This website stores nothing about you beyond what you send through its forms and the page counts described above, which hold no network address and no name. Cloudflare's own request logs are short-lived and are not ours.

Who processes your data

Supabase — our database, file storage, authentication and server functions (United States). Its own request logs record the IP address of every request for a period Supabase sets; we read them only to find faults.
Cloudflare — the Solitary Labs website, forecast data delivery, the connection that carries the app's requests to our servers, DNS and domain registration. Delivering a forecast tile, or passing a request to our servers, means Cloudflare sees your IP address; its request logs are short-lived and are not ours. It also stores our backups — copies of the database and of the files you upload — encrypted at rest, and deletes each copy within 30 days.
Apple — App Store distribution, TestFlight, App Attest device attestation, push notifications for spot alerts, the maps and place names inside the app, and RideScore subscription billing.
Google — Google Workspace hosts Solitary Labs email. A message you send to [email protected], and our reply, are stored by Google.
NOAA and the National Weather Service — public wave, wind, tide and current model data we read to compute forecasts; our servers send them nothing about you. While the Helm is open, and all through a recording, your phone also reads the latest report from the nearest NOAA buoy, a request that names only the buoy; it carries neither your account nor your name.
OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap — basemap vector tiles your phone downloads while you view the map.

We do not have a contract that lets any of these use your data for their own purposes; they process it to run our service. Everything we store is in the United States. If you use RideScore outside the US, your data is processed in the US.

Security

Every table carrying your data has row-level security from the first migration: from the app, your rows are readable and writable only by your account, and cross-account access is denied at the database, not just in the app. Our own servers and staff can read every row; that access is what lets us do our research, fix the forecast and answer support.
File storage is separated by account in the same way: an upload into another user's folder is refused, and our servers can read all of it.
Server ingestion validates every payload for physical plausibility and rejects impossible speeds, teleporting tracks, impossible accelerations and bad timestamps.
Transport is HTTPS throughout.
Uploads carry a check from Apple's App Attest that they come from a genuine copy of RideScore. Each installation registers a key with Apple for this; we keep that key's identifier and public key with your account, and delete them with it.
The server limits how many requests and uploads one account, or one network, can make in a short time, and how much one account can store in a day, so that one misbehaving phone cannot slow the service down for everyone else.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Legal requests

We will only disclose data in response to valid legal process — a subpoena, court order, or warrant that we believe is lawful and that actually reaches the data described. Our practice: we require valid process; we read it narrowly and produce only what it actually compels; we push back on requests that are overbroad or facially invalid; and we notify the affected user in advance where the law permits and we have a way to reach them.

Your choices and your rights

Do not record. Your boat profiles and their BoatScores work without recording. So do the forecast, the map and every Helm page. A ride reaches us only when you record it.
Delete a trip from this phone. Deleting a trip in the Trips list removes it and its files from the phone. It does not remove a ride you already uploaded from our servers — deleting your account does that, and it deletes all of them.
Delete your account. Settings > Delete account > Delete my account and data, behind two confirmations. It removes your rides, your track segments, your station summaries, your ride studies and research records, your boats, your alerted spots and alert settings, your notification tokens, your device-attestation keys, your subscription record, your sign-in records, your uploaded archives and your contributed-hours tally, and signs this phone out. If you signed in with Apple, it also tells Apple to disconnect RideScore from your Apple ID. It cannot be undone. Crash reports and the fast-path check rows described above are not touched, because nothing on them says they were yours.
Turn off permissions. iOS Settings controls location access. The app will not record without it.

If you would rather make one of these requests in writing, use the contact form. We do not charge for it, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If you write to support from the app, we receive what you send, including the app version, iOS version and iPhone model that the app's Email support fills in, which you can change before sending.

Children

RideScore is intended for adults operating boats. It is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If we learn that we have collected data from a child under 13, we delete it.

Flash

Flash, our nutrition tracker, is not on the App Store; it exists only as an internal test build and is still in development. Its privacy policy will be published on this site before it ships, and it will describe that app's own data handling specifically. Nothing on this page should be read as a description of Flash.

Changes

We will post changes here and update the date. For a change that materially expands what we collect or how we use it, we will ask again in the app rather than rely on a posted update.

If Solitary Labs or RideScore is sold or merged, your data goes with it and stays under this policy.

About the RideScore number

RideScore is a conditions index — a measurement and a forecast of how rough the water is and how a given hull is expected to ride it. It is not navigation guidance, not a safety determination, and not advice about whether to go out. Conditions change, forecasts are wrong, and the operator is responsible for the vessel. See the Data & Contributor Terms for the full statement.