Privacy Policy
Last updated 5 September 2026
Sarthe is an app for finding people to drive with. This policy explains exactly what it stores about you, why, and how to get rid of it. It describes what the app actually does, not what apps in general tend to do.
1. Who is responsible
[LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS, CYPRUS] is the data controller for the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Contact: privacy@sarthe.app
2. What we collect, and why
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | To create and sign you into your account | Contract |
| Display name, username, profile photo, short bio | So other drivers know who they would be meeting | Contract |
| Home country and city | Shown on your profile; used to orient the app | Contract |
| Your vehicles: type, make, model, year, photo | The main thing other people decide on when choosing who to drive with | Contract |
| Approximate location when you post a Ping | To show your Ping to drivers near you. See section 3. | Consent (device permission) |
| Precise location while you are searching | Sent to our server to run the "who is nearby" query. Not stored. | Consent (device permission) |
| Pings, Drives, Routes and comments you create | They are the content of the service | Contract |
| Who you follow, and thumbs up/down after a drive | Reputation, so meeting a stranger is a smaller leap | Legitimate interest (user safety) |
| Push notification token | To send the alerts you switched on | Consent |
We do not collect: contacts, photo library beyond the picture you choose, call or message history, advertising identifiers, or your location in the background. Sarthe has no advertising and no third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.
3. Location, specifically
This is the part worth reading closely, because it is where an app like this could do real harm and where we have deliberately given something up.
Posting a Ping
When you post a Ping, your device reads your position and sends it to our server. Before anything is written to the database, the server rounds the coordinates to a grid of 0.01 degrees, roughly 1.1 km. Only that rounded square is stored. The exact position is discarded and never saved.
This means the distances other people see ("4.2 km away") are calculated from an approximate square, not from where you actually are. It is deliberately not precise enough to identify a house, a street, or a parked car.
Searching for Pings and Drives
To answer "what is near me", your device sends your current position with the query. It is used to run that search and is not written to the database.
Drives
A Drive has a meeting point, and that is stored precisely, because it is a public meeting place you chose and published, not a record of where you live. Pick meeting points accordingly.
Turning it off
Location is never read in the background. You can revoke the permission at any time in your phone's settings; the app continues to work, but it cannot show you who is nearby.
4. Who else sees your data
Other people using Sarthe
- Your profile, vehicles and public Routes are visible to other signed-in users.
- A Ping is visible to drivers whose search area covers your approximate square, and only while it is live.
- Private Routes are visible to you alone.
- Your email address is never shown to other users.
Service providers
We use a small number of processors, each doing one job:
- Supabase: database, authentication and file storage. Data is held in the EU.
- Google Maps Platform: map display and route calculation. Coordinates you pin for a Route are sent to Google to calculate distance and duration.
- Expo / Apple / Google push services: delivery of notifications you opted into.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. There is nobody else.
5. How long we keep things
- Pings expire on their own: 4 hours for "Now", end of day for "Later today", end of week for "This week".
- Alert windows switch themselves off after 30 minutes.
- Profile, vehicles, Routes and Drives are kept until you delete them or close your account.
6. Deleting your account
Settings → Delete account. This is a real deletion, not a hidden flag: removing your account cascades through every table that references it. Vehicles, Routes, Drives, Pings, follows, ratings and alert windows all go with it, in one transaction. It cannot be undone and we cannot recover it for you afterwards.
7. Your rights
Under GDPR you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or hand it to another service. Most of this you can do yourself in the app; for anything else, email privacy@sarthe.app and we will respond within one month.
You also have the right to complain to the Cyprus Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection.
8. Age
Sarthe is for people who drive. You must be at least 18 to use it. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and we delete any account we find belonging to one.
9. Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to data is enforced at the database level by row-level security rules, so the rule that decides what you may read is applied by the database on every single query rather than by the app remembering to ask.
No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please email security@sarthe.app before disclosing it publicly.
10. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.