Data & Contributor Terms

The deal, in one paragraph

RideScore is free to record with, free to share with, and free to read the water you are on today. The rides you record are shared unless you have Pro and turn private mode on; shared rides feed our research into how boats ride and will build the shared conditions map when that is switched on. Sharing buys you nothing and is not required to buy anything: recording and sharing are free, Pro is a paid subscription, and no amount of contributed data earns it. You keep ownership of your data. You can export it, delete it, and — with private mode, or by not recording — stop contributing at any time, and you lose nothing you already have when you do.

Sharing, and private mode

Recording shares. The rides you record are uploaded unless private mode is on, and private mode is part of RideScore Pro. With it on, nothing from your rides leaves your phone: you keep the whole app — recording, your full ride history at full resolution, your boat profiles, the forecast — and your contributed-hours tally does not move, because we received nothing to count. Nothing else changes: contributing has never unlocked anything and does not now. There is no contribute-to-see wall.

Spot Guard is not a setting. It runs on every ride that is uploaded, for every account, and there is no way to switch it off — not in the app, not by asking us. What it withholds is withheld on your phone before anything is sent, so the hours it holds back are hours we never receive and never count.

Spot Guard keeps your dock and your fishing spots on your phone. It is part of how RideScore uploads — always on, on every ride, with nothing to switch on and nothing to forget.

Private mode is the one sharing choice there is. You can turn it on and off at any time; the setting in force when a ride starts governs that ride.

What Spot Guard protects

Spot Guard exists because the secret isn't how rough the water is — it's where you stop. A competitor watching a public map for where boats slow down, loiter, or cluster is looking for where the fish are. And the place you stop most often is where you keep the boat. Spot Guard breaks both, on every ride:

• Below 8 knots, no precise coordinate leaves your phone. Your time stopped or drifting is tagged with the centre of a wide cell — roughly 5 nautical miles across — plus a depth band, and nothing finer is uploaded. The motion data still goes: a drifting boat measures true sea state better than anything else we have, which is why the guard coarsens the position rather than dropping the data.
• Both ends of every run are withheld. The stretch before you drop off plane never uploads, and neither does the stretch after you get up on it — at least 2 nautical miles and at least 10 minutes at each end, whichever of the two is longer. Both are discarded on the phone, not delayed.
• Your own history is untouched. Spot Guard is an exit filter and nothing more. Your recording stays full resolution on your phone, always.

What Spot Guard does not protect

We would rather tell you this plainly than have you find out later.

• It does not hide where you run. Above 8 knots, unless private mode is on, your position track leaves the phone at full resolution and is stored on our servers. Spot Guard trims the two ends; the middle of the run is data we hold.
• It does not make your uploads anonymous. Data we receive is stored against your account identifier. Other users cannot read it. Solitary Labs can, and does: we read and process it for our research into how boats ride, to check and improve the forecast, and to run the service. It is not published, and it is not sold as your data — what we do sell is aggregated statistics, described below — but it exists, it is linked to your account, and valid legal process can reach it.
• It is a filter, not a guarantee against every inference. In sparsely used water a five-mile cell may still point at the only dock in it. A track that begins and ends at your dock says something about you even with the middle removed.
• It does not protect you while you are trolling. The guard is built around the place you STOP. Working a fish at 4 knots is below the gate and is coarsened like any other slow water, but a slow troll that holds above 8 knots is a run, and the middle of a run is uploaded.
• It does not apply to your own device. If someone has your unlocked phone, they have your spots.

What is ever shown publicly

There is no shared surface today: the map in the app is computed from public weather data, not from anyone's rides. When one is built it will render grid cells only, and only ever from the coarsened fishing lane. Never dots. Never track lines. Never names — we do not have your name.

What you grant us

You keep ownership of your data. When you record a ride that is shared — which is every ride unless private mode is on — you grant Solitary Labs a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, process, analyze, and create derived and aggregated works from the ride data your device uploads, for these purposes only:

• Operating and improving RideScore — the conditions map, the forecast, the scoring model, hull normalization, and the accuracy of all of it.
• Producing aggregated and anonymised outputs: cell-level conditions, per-hull-model ride characteristics, and comparable fleet-scale statistics.
• Publishing, licensing, and selling those aggregated and anonymised outputs to third parties — bounded by the limits below, which are part of this grant.
• Research and development on how boats ride, including work that becomes part of our patents and our proprietary index.
• This license survives deletion only for aggregates already computed and already de-identified, which cannot be unwound retroactively. It does not extend to your identified raw data after you delete it.

What we will not do

• We will not sell your raw data. Not your tracks, not your telemetry, not your rides, to anyone, in identified or pseudonymous form.
• We will not sell or share your location for advertising or cross-context behavioral advertising.
• We will not publish anything that identifies you or your boat, or that renders a track line, on any shared surface.
• We will not use your data to profile you or make automated decisions about you.
• We will not hand your data to a boat manufacturer, dealer, insurer, or law-enforcement agency except under valid legal process, described in the Privacy Policy.

What we may do with aggregates

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

These bounds are part of these terms, and we are bound by them:

• Aggregated and anonymised 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.
• If we ever want to go beyond these five bounds, we will ask you again in the app. A posted update to these terms is not enough for that.

Export and deletion

• Export: a ride's raw sensor archive, as a ZIP, from that trip's screen.
• Delete a trip from this phone: removes it and its files from the phone. It does not remove an uploaded ride from our servers on its own — deleting your account does.
• Delete your account and all of your data: Settings > Delete account > Delete my account and data, behind two confirmations. It deletes your rides, your transit segments and station summaries, your ride studies and research records, your boats, your watched squares, your uploaded archives and your contributed-hours tally, and signs this phone out. Crash reports and the fast-path check rows carry nothing that says they were yours, so they are not touched. It cannot be undone.
• Stop contributing: turn private mode on, or do not record. Rides already uploaded stay until you delete your account; there is no separate control that withdraws them. The copy of the sensor archive we hold goes on its own after 90 days, and at 90 days the per-hit research record stops carrying your account, your exact position, your exact time and your boat — both of those unless you rated the ride or recorded it in private mode, and see "How long we keep things" in the Privacy Policy — but the ride and its study stay until you delete the account.
• Aggregates already computed and already de-identified are not reconstructed to remove a contributor, because they no longer contain a contributor.

Your contribution

We still count your hours, and you can still see the total. Contributor hours are hours of ride data the server actually received. Nothing more, and nothing less. The only time excluded is the time Spot Guard actually withholds, because that time never reaches us. There is no per-ride zeroing and no all-or-nothing rule. A ride is never wasted.

Hours are counted against the account that owns the boat — one tally per boat. Running someone else's boat with your own phone contributes data and helps the map; it does not add a second tally for the same water.

Contributing is never a penalty. Turning sharing off, deleting a ride, or exercising any privacy right never downgrades the app you have or degrades the service you get.

RideScore Pro — what it costs and what it does not gate

Recording a ride, sharing it, the live Helm, the Ride Rose, your trip summary, your trip log, your contribution total, the export of your own raw sensor archive, and the conditions on the water right now — at any spot, not only where you are — are free, and are not a trial. Pro adds the hours ahead: the forecast past the current hour on the map and at any spot, with its hour-by-hour scrubber, the best-days planner and its alerts, the full trip report and its share card, private mode, and GPX and CSV export.

• RideScore Pro is $99.99 per year or $12.99 per month, in US dollars. Prices in other countries are set by Apple's pricing tiers and are shown in the app before you buy.
• New subscribers get the first month free on either plan. The subscription then renews automatically at the price shown, and keeps renewing until it is cancelled.
• Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation. Renewal is charged within 24 hours of the end of the current period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends.
• Cancel any time in Settings > your name > Subscriptions on your device. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not refund the period you are in, and refunds are handled by Apple, not by us.
• A subscription is the only way to have Pro. Recording and sharing are free, and Pro is bought.
• We can change the price of a future renewal of the annual or monthly plan. Apple tells you and asks you to agree before an increase takes effect, and if you do not agree the subscription simply stops renewing instead of costing more.

Data quality and fair use

The shared data is a commons, and poisoning it hurts everyone. You agree not to submit falsified data, spoof your location, automate or fabricate rides, or attempt to manipulate the aggregates. We validate every upload for physical plausibility and we verify that data comes from the genuine app on genuine Apple hardware. We may reject data, exclude it from your contribution total, and terminate an account that does this. Where we reject data, we will say why.

What RideScore is — and what it is not

RideScore is a conditions index. It is a measurement of how rough the water is, and a forecast of how a given hull is expected to ride it, calibrated to a reference boat. It is a number, produced by our own proprietary physics, calibration and aggregation pipeline.

RideScore is not advice. It does not tell you whether to go out. It is not a go/no-go determination, not a safety rating, not a seaworthiness assessment, not navigation guidance, and not a substitute for the official marine forecast, for charts, or for your own judgment.

The operator is responsible for the vessel. Conditions change faster than any forecast. Forecasts are wrong. The water where you are is not always the water in the model. You are responsible for deciding whether to go, where to go, how fast to run, and when to turn around — and for the boat, the crew, and everyone aboard.

The forecast is a model. Where the fleet has not yet ridden, the number comes from physics priors and public weather data, and the app labels how confident it is.

Beta

RideScore carries a BETA label until forecast skill has been validated against our archived observations. During beta especially, the numbers may be wrong in ways we have not yet found.

No warranty

The service is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Solitary Labs LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss arising from your use of, or reliance on, RideScore numbers, forecasts, or maps. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so they may not apply to you. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Our intellectual property

The RideScore index, the physics and calibration pipeline behind it, the hull normalization, the aggregation methods, the map, the software, and the RideScore and Spot Guard names are ours. Your data is yours; what we build from the fleet is ours. Nothing in these terms transfers our intellectual property to you, and nothing transfers yours to us beyond the license above.

Contact and governing law

Solitary Labs LLC, a South Carolina limited liability company.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of South Carolina, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Charleston County, South Carolina.

Questions about these terms: [email protected].