ROVR

Who runs this

One person: Dries. Not a company, and there is nobody else to escalate to. There is one email address, and it is the support desk, the data-protection contact and the way to ask for your data to be deleted if you cannot sign in and do it yourself, all three. You will find it in the panel under Settings. It is not printed here or on the sign-in page. Both can be read by anybody who knows the hostname, and an address on a page like that ends up in a spam list shortly afterward.

Where your rides come from

Up to three places, and you choose which: Ride with GPS, Strava, and ride files you upload yourself. You can use more than one. A ride that arrives from two of them is counted once, and both copies are kept, so that removing one later does not lose the ride.

From Strava, if you connect it: your activities, and for each one its Strava id, name, type, date, distance and its recorded GPS track. Private activities are included — a coverage map that skipped them would be wrong, which is why the permission is asked for up front. From your profile: your Strava athlete id and display name, so the panel knows whose dashboard is whose.

From Ride with GPS, if you connect it: your trips, which are the rides you recorded, and for each one its id, name, type, date, distance and recorded GPS track. Private trips are included, for the same reason. From your profile: your Ride with GPS user id and display name. Your planned routes there are not read.

From files you upload: GPX, TCX and FIT files, one at a time or in a ZIP, and the export ZIP Strava gives you. What is kept from each is its date, its type, its distance and its GPS track. A file with no times in it is refused.

What you sign in with

Strava, Ride with GPS, or an email address and a password. If you set a password, the address is stored and the password is stored only in a scrambled form that cannot be turned back into the password. ROVR sends that address a link to choose a new password, and only when you ask for one on the sign-in page. That link works once, for an hour. Dries can also make you one by hand, which works for a day. You can also give ROVR an email address with no password. If you ask for it when you sign up, ROVR sends that address one message when your first map is ready. If you change or remove your email address, ROVR sends the old one a single message with a link that undoes it, and keeps the old address for 7 days so that link can work. ROVR's occasional emails, about a milestone you reached, your year or a big new feature, go to that address only if you ask for them: that is a box of its own, at sign-up and in Settings, and it stays unticked until you tick it. You can switch them off again in Settings, or from a link in each one.

What it is used for

Turning those tracks into the map squares you have covered, and the statistics on that page — your tile count, your biggest square, your cluster. That is the entire purpose, with two additions. Your numbers go on the scoreboard unless you switch that off (see "Who can look at it"). And if weather is on in Settings, the time and place of each new ride are also used to work out what the weather was along it (see below). It is not profiled, not analyzed for anything else, not sold, not handed to anybody, and not used to train any model.

A crossing you draw on your map is kept with your account: the name you gave it and where you drew it. It is used to count how often your rides go over it. No other rider sees it.

What is written back

To Strava: a short block of text added to the description of each new ride: your tile counts and, if weather is on, the temperature, wind, and rain along that ride. Anyone who can see the ride on Strava can read it. Tile counts and weather both start on when you connect Strava, whether at sign-up or later, and each has its own switch in Settings. There are two exceptions, and in both weather is off until you turn it on: an account made before October 9, 2026, and one that unticked the weather box the sign-up page had until October 13, 2026. Either way ROVR writes only to rides you upload while the switch is on. The permission to write is asked for at sign-in, because Strava cannot widen it later without sending you through the whole sign-in again.

A crossing can add one more line to that block: the words you chose for it and which time over it that ride was. Every crossing has its own box for this, and the box is unticked until you tick it.

To Ride with GPS: a route you planned here, when you press the button that sends it, and nothing else unless you switch something on in Settings. Nothing that came from Strava is ever sent to Ride with GPS, and nothing that came from Ride with GPS is ever sent to Strava.

Where it is kept

With a commercial cloud computing service located in the EU. The backups are kept with the same service. It is the only other company holding a copy of your rides. Copies from before the move in October 2026 are deleted within 30 days.

Four other companies are involved without holding your rides. Cloudflare carries every request to this site, so it sees the addresses you ask for and the network address you come from; it is there so that the server does not have to face the internet directly. Strava and Ride with GPS (ridewithgps.com) are where your rides come from, if you connect them, and each already has the rides it gives ROVR. Ride with GPS also receives a planned route, and only if you connect your own account there and press the button that sends it — a planned route is somewhere you have not been yet, so none of your history goes with it.

A commercial email service located in the EU delivers the email ROVR sends. It sees the address a message goes to and the message itself, and keeps its own record of each message for 28 days. It is never given a ride or a track. If you ask for ROVR's occasional emails, one of them can include figures from your own rides, such as a distance or a tile count, and those are in that record like the rest of the message. If you send a problem report, what you typed is emailed to Dries the same way. Nothing is added to a message to see whether you opened it or what you pressed.

While weather is on, public weather services are asked about each new ride: the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (Iowa State University) and the Aviation Weather Center (NOAA, aviationweather.gov), and for a ride in Canada or Germany that country's own weather service, Environment and Climate Change Canada (api.weather.gc.ca) or Deutscher Wetterdienst (opendata.dwd.de). What they receive is the code of a nearby weather station (an airport's or a national weather service's) and a window of clock time. Never your coordinates, your route, your name, your account or the ride itself, so they cannot tell whose request it is; they see only that somebody asked for that station and that time, along with the network address of the server. While weather is off, they are never contacted for you.

If you turn on notices, ROVR keeps an address for that device, which your browser hands out for this purpose. The notice travels through the push service of whoever makes your browser: Apple, Google, Mozilla or Microsoft. They can see that ROVR sent you something and when. They cannot read it. Turning the switch off deletes the address.

There is no analytics service, no ad network, no tracking pixel and no advertising identifier. Nobody outside that list is given anything.

Who can look at it

No other rider can see your rides, your tracks, your ride names or your map. The one thing other riders see is the scoreboard. It shows each rider's tile and distance records side by side, with initials beside them, and only riders who are on it can read it. The initials are worked out from the name on your Strava or Ride with GPS account, and you can change them to anything you like. You are on the scoreboard unless you switch it off in Settings, and coming off also stops you seeing anybody else's numbers. It never shows a ride, a route, a ride name or a date. Everything else in the panel answers for whoever is signed in and for nobody else.

You can. So can Dries — this is a small beta and working out why something is broken means looking at the data it broke on. Every such access is written to a log, and you can ask to see that log.

How long it is kept, and how to end it

Your rides and your map are kept for as long as you have an account. That is the product rather than an oversight: it is a record of where you have been, shown back to you, and a version of it that forgot last year would not be worth having.

Three things do expire on their own. The log of every time your data was opened is kept 400 days. Records of background work — imports, syncs, and whatever they printed when they went wrong — are kept 30 days. Backup archives are kept 28 days, which is the one that matters when something is deleted: a file gone from the live system can still sit in a backup for up to 28 days afterward.

The site also keeps logs of requests: the page asked for, the time, your network address and what your browser says about itself. They overwrite themselves as they fill, today within about two weeks.

Disconnect Strava in Settings and two things happen. The stored credential is deleted, and ROVR tells Strava to drop its authorization too, so it stops appearing in your Strava connected-apps list. If that credential had already expired ROVR cannot do the second half, and the page says so rather than pretending. Remove it yourself at the link below. Either way nothing of yours is read from Strava again. If you have another way in, you stay a rider here, and a ride that also came from Ride with GPS or from a file lets go of its Strava copy and carries on from the other one.

Disconnect Ride with GPS in Settings and the same two things happen there: the stored credential is deleted and Ride with GPS is told to drop the authorization. If Ride with GPS is the only thing you sign in with, set a password first; without one, disconnecting would lock you out of your own account, and it is refused.

Switch off your account in Settings and the panel stops answering for you, every device is signed out, and ROVR hands its permission back to Strava and Ride with GPS. Nothing already stored is deleted by that, or by disconnecting.

Delete your account in Settings and it goes right then: rides, tracks, tiles, numbers, settings, your name, your email address and your password. ROVR tells Strava and Ride with GPS to take its permission away first. One locked copy is kept for 30 days, so that a mistake can be put right, and then it is deleted too. Backups age out on the 28 days above. If you cannot sign in, write to the address described above and it is done for you, usually inside seven days and never later than 30. What is kept afterward is the record that an account existed and agreed to something: an internal id, your rider id, the date you joined, and the wording you agreed to, and whether and when you asked for ROVR's emails. For anyone who joined through Strava the rider id is their Strava athlete id, unless they deleted an account here before and came back: then it is a number ROVR made up. It stays because the record of what you agreed to is kept under it. You can also revoke access yourself from your Strava account settings.

Your rights over this data

The legal basis is your consent, given at sign-up, and it is the only basis used here. Nothing is done on the grounds that it would be convenient, or useful, or interesting.

You can ask for a copy of everything held about you, and get it as files you can actually read: your rides including their GPS tracks, your tiles at each zoom level, your account, the exact wording you agreed to, and the log of every time your data was opened. You can ask for it to be corrected, with one honest exception: if you connected Strava or Ride with GPS your name comes from there and is copied again, so that one has to be fixed there. You can delete it, as above, or ask for it to be done for you. You can ask for it to be left alone while something is in dispute, which is what switching off the account does. You can object to any of it. And you can withdraw your consent at any time, which is what disconnecting, or switching off your account, does. Withdrawing it does not make what already happened unlawful, and it does not cost you anything else.

Requests are answered inside 30 days and usually inside seven. Write to the address described above. No form, no reason required, and nobody is going to ask you for a photograph of your passport.

If the answer is unsatisfactory you can complain to a data protection authority: in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office, in the EU the authority where you live. That is a real route and taking it is not held against anybody.

Where this happens

Your data is kept in the EU. ROVR is run from the United States, so your data is reached from there. If you are in the EU or the UK, there is no adequacy decision, standard contractual clause or other formal transfer mechanism behind that. The basis is your explicit consent, which is why this paragraph exists. If that is not a trade you want to make, do not sign up.

Strava

If you connect Strava, those rides reach ROVR through the Strava API, and how Strava handles them is covered by Strava's own privacy policy, not this one.

ROVR and Strava are separate and independent controllers of your data, which is what their API agreement sets out. In plain terms: each answers for its own copy, and neither can act for the other. Ask Strava about what Strava holds, ask here about what is held here, and if you write to the wrong one of us about it you will be told which, rather than left waiting.

Weather

Weather is optional, and the switch is in Settings. It starts on for an account made since October 9, 2026, and off for every older account. The sign-up page had a box for it until October 13, 2026, and an account that unticked it starts off too. For each ride you upload while it is on, ROVR matches the track against a list of weather stations (airports and national weather services) kept on the server, so the matching happens here and your track never leaves it. Only the station codes and a time window are then looked up, as described above. The result is written into the same block as your tile counts, in the ride's Strava description, and kept with that ride's record here as a few numbers and no locations. It is covered by the same copy, export, and deletion as the rest of that record, and turning weather off stops new rides getting it without removing what is already on Strava. The text is built from fixed templates; no AI is involved. The measurements themselves are the weather services': the US National Weather Service's and other countries' airport reports, Environment and Climate Change Canada's (contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada) and Deutscher Wetterdienst's (source: Deutscher Wetterdienst), converted to your units and summarized here.

Ride with GPS

If you connect Ride with GPS, those trips reach ROVR through the Ride with GPS API, and how Ride with GPS handles them is covered by their own privacy policy, not this one. The same applies: each answers for its own copy.

What is not promised

Strava, Ride with GPS, Cloudflare, the cloud service and the email service each run their own service on their own terms and none of them warrants anything to you through ROVR. Nothing on this site is a promise on their behalf. Nor is the weather: it is read from the nearest airport station, which can be miles from where you rode, and it can be late, patchy or wrong, so do not decide what to wear or whether to ride from it. Nor is a route ROVR plans for you: roads change, map data is wrong sometimes, and you are the one on the bike. Judge the road in front of you, not the line on the screen.

This is a beta

It is small and one person runs it. It breaks sometimes. If that is not a trade you want to make with your ride history, do not sign up — that is a reasonable decision and no hard feelings.

If you are waiting for a Strava place

Strava limits how many riders ROVR may connect. When every place is taken, the form at /waitlist is the waiting list for one; before sign-up was open, the same form was how to ask to join. You do not need an account to use it, and if you have none, nothing above applies to you. It asks for an email address, and for anything you care to say about yourself. Both are held for one purpose: so that Dries can write to you when a place opens. Nothing is looked up about you, your address goes to nobody except the email service that delivers that one message and keeps its record of it for 28 days, and that waiting list is the only list you are on. The check that you are a person and not a machine is Cloudflare's, who carry every request to this site anyway.

A request is deleted after 180 days whether you heard back or not. If you want it gone sooner, or want to know what is held, send another one through the same form and say so. That reaches the same place, and it is the only route that does not involve printing an email address on a page anybody can read.