Nine Tenths · last updated 13 August 2026
This policy describes exactly what the app does with your data. It was written by auditing the app’s own network calls and storage, not from a template.
Nine Tenths has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking. It collects your location because it cannot suggest roads near you otherwise.
There is one exception to “nobody sees where you are”, and it only happens if you switch it on: Driving together. While that is running, the people you share a drive code with can see your position on their map, under a name you type. It is off unless you turn it on, it stops when the drive ends, and nothing about it is written to disk. The section below says exactly what is shared and for how long.
Precise location, only while the app is open or actively navigating.
Location is requested through the standard iOS permission prompt. You can refuse, and the app still works — it falls back to a default starting point and you can pick somewhere else on the map.
A display name, if you set one or use Driving together. Two places use it: the name you type when you join a group drive, which lasts only for that drive, and an optional name in Settings that goes into invites you send so they read “Alex wants you on this drive” instead of showing a bare code. It is whatever you want to be called — not verified, not an account, and nobody receiving two invites can tell they came from the same person. The Settings one is stored on your phone and sent only inside an invite you chose to send.
Nothing else. No email, no contacts, no photos, no device identifiers, no advertising ID.
| When | What is sent |
|---|---|
| Finding roads or generating a loop | Your latitude and longitude, and the drive time you chose |
| Building a route by hand | The coordinates you tapped |
| Getting turn-by-turn directions | The route’s waypoints |
| Scoring a drive you recorded | The GPS trace of that drive |
| Sharing a route | The route’s geometry, and a label |
| Driving together, about every 10 seconds | Your position, heading and speed, with the name you typed and the drive code |
Requests are not tied to an account, because there are no accounts. They are not logged against a profile, and no identifier follows you between requests.
Recorded drives are only sent if you finish a drive, and they are sent to work out which roads you covered. The result comes straight back to you.
Saved routes and recorded drives are written to the app’s private storage on your phone. They never leave it unless you choose to score or share one, and deleting the app deletes them.
Shared routes. When you share a route you get a six-character code and a link containing it, and the route is stored so whoever you give either to can open it. The link carries the code, the route’s label and your display name if you set one — and nothing else: anything else put into a link is ignored. It holds the road geometry and a label — not your location history and nothing that identifies you. Anyone with the code can open it, so treat a code as public.
Driving together positions, in memory only, briefly. While a group drive is running, the server holds the recent positions of everyone in it so it can pass them to each other. Specifically:
This is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation: if it is not stored, it cannot be lost, sold, subpoenaed or forgotten about.
Nothing is published unless you tap Publish. Rating a drive keeps the rating on your phone; publishing is a separate, deliberate action.
There is still no account. Your phone generates a random key the first time you publish and keeps it. It exists so you can remove something you published, and does nothing else — it carries no name, no email, no profile, and there is no way to tell that two published routes came from the same person.
What is published: the middle of the route, its distance and duration, the label, and your rating.
Both ends are cut off before it is stored. A joyride starts wherever you were standing, which for most people is home, and publishing that unedited would publish your home address to anyone nearby. Roughly a kilometre is removed from each end, on our servers, before anything is written down. A drive too short to survive that trim is refused rather than published in part.
What is not published: when you drove it, how fast you drove it, your recorded GPS trace, or anything about any other drive.
Removing it: the app can unpublish anything you published from this phone. If you delete the app you lose the key, and with it the ability to remove those routes — so they stay up. Nothing in them identifies you.
It is off unless you turn it on. Sharing your position starts when you join a drive with a code and switch sharing on, and stops when the drive ends or you leave.
Who can see you: anyone holding that drive code. The code is the only key — there is no membership list and no approval step, exactly like a shared route. So treat a drive code the way you would treat a door key, and only give it to people you are actually driving with.
What they see: your position on the map, your name, how long ago your position arrived, and whether the app thinks you have gone off the route or stopped.
What they do not see: anything about you outside that drive — no history, no saved routes, no recorded drives, no contact details.
How to stop: leave the drive, end the drive, or turn sharing off. Any of those removes you from everyone else’s map. Closing the app also stops the updates, and you disappear from the group within 30 minutes.
One honest limitation. These roads often have no mobile signal, so your position will frequently be out of date, and so will everyone else’s. The app shows the age of every position for that reason and greys out anyone it has not heard from. Do not treat it as a safety system — it cannot tell the difference between a lost signal and a stopped car, and it says so rather than guessing.
Map tiles come from OpenFreeMap. Loading a map means
your device requests tiles from tiles.openfreemap.org,
which reveals your IP address and roughly which area you are looking at.
That is inherent to any app that shows a map it does not host itself.
OpenFreeMap’s own terms apply to those requests, and the map data in
those tiles comes from OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap.
Hill shading comes from Mapzen elevation tiles,
served from Amazon Web Services’ open data programme at
s3.amazonaws.com. The same applies: your device requests
them directly, so your IP address and the area you are looking at are
visible to that service.
Road data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database Licence. That data is downloaded and processed by us in advance; using the app sends nothing to OpenStreetMap.
There are no analytics SDKs, no crash reporters, no advertising networks and no social logins in this app.
The app deliberately does not record, score, rank or display how fast you drove. Recorded drives measure distance, duration and which roads you covered. Speed is used momentarily to tell driving from being parked, and is never surfaced, stored as a record, or compared with anyone else.
Nine Tenths is intended for licensed drivers and is not directed at children.
Material changes will be reflected here with a new date at the top.
The app is published by Nine Tenths, LLC, a Pennsylvania limited liability company, which is the party responsible for the data described above.
A privacy policy that never names the publisher tells you nothing about who is answerable for it, which is the one thing it exists to establish.
Email support@ninetenths.app, or see the support page.
Requests about data — including deletion of a shared route — go to the same address.