Privacy Policy
VADO, the iOS app, and the VADO Places board.
Last updated: 9 September 2026
Who is responsible
TILT S.R.L., Via Nazario Sauro 26, 24123 Bergamo, Italy, VAT 04648930164 ("we") publishes the VADO app and runs the VADO Places board server. We are the data controller for the small amount of data described here.
Contact: vado@tilt.computer
The short version
VADO records your bike rides on your phone and keeps them there. There is no account and no login. Nothing you record is sent anywhere unless you switch on one of the two sharing features yourself, and each one shows you exactly what it would send before you turn it on. We run no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising, and VADO does not track you across other apps or websites.
What stays on your phone
Everything VADO records lives in the app's own storage on your device:
- your rides, including the full GPS route, distance, duration, speed and elevation gain
- the Home and Work locations you set, and the optional workplace you pick from Apple Maps
- your settings
- a diagnostic event log, used to investigate tracking problems
We cannot see any of it. There is no cloud sync, no backup held by us, and no way for us to read your device. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
What can leave your phone, and only because you asked
1. The Places board (off by default)
If you turn on "Share commutes with your workplace", VADO sends one line for each
ride between Home and Work to a server we run at api.vado.tilt.computer.
Each line contains:
- an identifier for that ride, generated at random on your phone
- the identifier and name of your workplace, as Apple Maps supplies them
- the comune and provincia of your workplace, where Apple Maps supplies them
- the calendar date of the ride, with no time of day
- the distance in metres
Alongside it your phone sends four yes or no answers: whether this is the first ride you have sent to that workplace this week, this month, this year, and ever. That is how the board can report how many people cycle to a place without knowing who they are. It also sends the calendar date of the send itself, so a count lands in the right week.
The request carries a key that is identical in every copy of the app. It is not personal to you and it does not identify your device.
What is never sent: your route, any coordinate, your speed, your elevation, the time of day, your name, your email address, any device or advertising identifier, and any ride that is not a Home to Work commute.
What the server stores: the ride lines above, the workplace names, and running totals per workplace. There is no column anywhere that identifies a rider, a device or an installation, and there is no account for anything to attach to.
Your IP address is not stored. The server sees it, as every web server does, and uses it only to limit how many requests one connection can make. It is turned into a one-way digest under a secret that is regenerated every time the server restarts, held in memory, and never written to a database, a log file or an error report. Access logging on the web proxy in front of the server is switched off.
Honesty about anonymity. The board holds nothing that names you. That is not the same as promising a record could never be traced back. At a workplace where only one or two people use VADO, someone who already knows your commute could recognise a distance. We therefore treat these records as pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and that is exactly why the payload is as small as it is.
The board is public. It lists workplaces, never people.
2. Strava export (off by default)
If you connect a Strava account and turn sharing on, VADO uploads finished rides to your own Strava account. By default it sends only commutes.
This is a transfer you direct to a third party you hold an account with. What is sent is the ride itself: either a GPX file of the recorded track, or the numbers alone if you switch the route off. Your Strava tokens are stored in your device's Keychain and are never sent to us.
VADO asks Strava for permission to write activities and to read the activity it has just uploaded. It does not read your Strava history, your profile, your followers or your private activities. Strava's own privacy policy governs what happens to a ride once it arrives there.
Two consequences worth knowing. Strava offers no way to delete an activity through its API, so a ride published there cannot be removed by VADO, and deleting the ride on your phone leaves it on Strava. And "muting" a ride hides it from your followers' feeds without making it private. Only your own Strava visibility setting does that.
Apple services
Maps inside VADO are drawn by Apple's MapKit, so showing a map fetches tiles from Apple. When you search for an address or pick a workplace, the text you type and the map area you are looking at are sent to Apple to answer that search. This happens only while that screen is open, it never involves a recorded ride, and we receive none of it. Apple's privacy policy governs it.
The diagnostic log
VADO keeps an event log on your device so tracking faults can be investigated, and the Diagnostics screen can export it. Nothing is exported on its own and nothing reaches us automatically.
If you choose to send us a log to help diagnose a problem, please know it is not free of location data. It records the position of the temporary geofence the app parks as you ride, which amounts to a coarse trace of your route and of the areas around your Home and Work. Send one only if you are comfortable with that, and only to someone you intend to.
What we never do
- no analytics, no usage statistics, no telemetry of any kind
- no crash reporting
- no advertising, no advertising identifier, no profiling
- no tracking of you across other companies' apps or websites
- no third-party SDKs inside the app
- no sharing with data brokers
- no selling, renting or trading of any data at all
How long things are kept
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Rides on your phone | until you delete them, or delete the app |
| A ride's record on the board | 12 months |
| The commuter totals | kept as statistics, holding nothing personal |
We keep no database backups that outlive the 12-month record promise.
What you can take back, and what you cannot
Deleting a ride in VADO removes its record from the board, the next time the app can reach the server.
It does not undo the count. The totals are numbers with no memory of who added to them, so "someone rode here that week" remains. Nothing can undo that, including us.
Turning sharing off stops future rides being sent. It is not retroactive in either direction: rides already sent stay, and rides recorded while sharing was off are never sent afterwards.
Deleting the app retracts nothing, because there is no account to retract through. If you want your records off the board, delete the rides inside the app first and let it run once with a connection.
Your rights
If you are in the EU or the UK you have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict and object to the processing of your personal data, the right to data portability, and the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In Italy that is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali.
Please note what our design means in practice. Everything VADO records is already in your hands, on your device. The board holds nothing that identifies you, so we cannot find "your" records by being told who you are. The only thing that can identify them is the app on your phone, which holds the identifier of every ride it sent. Erasing a board record therefore happens through the app, as described above. If that route does not work for you, write to us and we will help.
Legal basis
We rely on your consent for the Places board, given by the switch and the confirmation screen that shows you the payload first. You can withdraw it at any time by turning sharing off. The Strava export is a transfer you initiate yourself, to your own account with a third party.
Where the data is
The board server and its database run on Hetzner infrastructure in Germany. Data stays in the European Union and we make no international transfer of it.
Children
VADO is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes we will update this page and the date at the top. A change that would widen what leaves your device appears in the app first, on the screen that asks for your consent, before anything new is sent.