Privacy Policy

5. Account registration

When you create a DriveBattle account we process your display name, email address and password (stored exclusively as a cryptographic hash) to provide the service (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). We send a verification email to confirm your address; unverified accounts are deleted automatically after 24 hours.

System emails (verification, password reset, account notices) are sent via Migadu Mail SA (Switzerland). Switzerland is covered by an EU adequacy decision (Art. 45 GDPR).

Abuse prevention at sign-up: in addition, when you register we store your IP address and – in the Android app – the device identifier (ANDROID_ID) exclusively as cryptographic hashes. The raw values are never stored. The sole purpose is to detect abuse of our referral programme (multiple accounts from the same device). Legal basis is our legitimate interest in preventing abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Note: hashed identifiers still count as personal (pseudonymised) data.

Referral programme: if you join via an invitation link, we store whose invitation your account originated from, your driving progress up to the bonus threshold, and the status of the credit. Whoever referred you only sees your display name and that progress – not your drives. We also keep an internal points ledger (XP) in which every credit is recorded individually with its time and reason (e.g. kilometres driven, badges unlocked); it is the basis for your level and the leaderboards (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

6. Cloudflare Turnstile (bot protection)

We use Cloudflare Turnstile (Cloudflare, Inc., USA) to protect our registration form from bots. Your IP address is transmitted to Cloudflare when the widget loads and behaviour is analysed to distinguish humans from bots. No advertising cookies are set. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in preventing abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework apply.

7. Fonts

All fonts ("Barlow", "Barlow Condensed") are served from our own server. No connection is made to Google Fonts or any other third-party font service.

8. Location and drive data (app)

Recording drives is the core function of the DriveBattle app. For this we process – only after your explicit consent to location access (opt-in, Art. 6(1)(a) and (b) GDPR) – the following data:

• GPS tracks of your drives (positions, timestamps, speeds) and statistics derived from them (distance, duration, average/top speed, elevation gain, curves, lean angle where applicable).
• Vehicle data: the vehicles you add (label, vehicle type, make, model, series/generation) and the Bluetooth identifier of your vehicle or helmet if you set up automatic drive detection.
• Maintenance data: if you use the maintenance reminders, your vehicle's running odometer reading (derived from the baseline you set yourself plus the kilometres driven afterwards), the service intervals you choose, and your digital service book (work carried out, with date and odometer reading).
• Live position during an ongoing drive, if you have enabled live sharing for a crew (can be disabled per crew).
• Track mode: the results of your sessions (lap times, sectors, acceleration and braking runs, wheelies, lean angle) including the lap recording with GPS positions. They are stored on your device first and additionally backed up on our server, so they survive reinstalling the app or switching phones. This backup is accessible only to you and is never shown to anyone else (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
• OBD2 vehicle values: only if you pair an OBD2 adapter with the app and record a drive: engine values (e.g. RPM, engine load, coolant and oil temperature, supply voltage, fuel flow) once per second matched to the GPS points, figures calculated from them (fuel consumption, idle time, peak values) and the Bluetooth name of your adapter. The vehicle identification number is not read. The values are stored with the drive and can only be retrieved by you: they are not shown to crew members or strangers, not in live location, shared routes, GPX files or share cards, and do not feed into leaderboards or anti-cheat. You can delete them separately for each drive; they are deleted with the drive or your account, and they are part of your data export (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

Privacy zones: You can define zones (e.g. around your home). The start and end of your tracks are cut at a random radius before others see them; the centre of a zone is visible only to you. Inside active zones your live position is fully suppressed. Track sharing can be disabled per crew, and you can hide your top speed from others.

Live location sharing ("follow me"): Optionally you can share your live location for a limited time – in two variants:

• 1:1 with one person: with a single person you explicitly confirm (mutual consent required).
• Public link: alternatively you can generate a link that you may pass on freely. Anyone who knows that link can see your live location – with no account and no sign-in, for as long as the share is running (see section 9). So only pass such a link to people you deliberately want to allow.

For both of these deliberate shares, privacy zones do not apply. A share ends automatically after the duration you chose (5 minutes to 24 hours) and can be terminated at any time; the link is worthless afterwards.

Voluntary navigation feedback: after you finish a navigation session we occasionally ask whether the route was good. If – and only if – you submit this feedback, we transmit the planned route and the route actually driven alongside your rating and free-text comment. These geometries are deliberately NOT cut by your privacy zones – without the real course of the route, a routing error cannot be reproduced. Device model and operating system version are included as well. The prompt is voluntary and can be skipped at any time, the data is visible to administrators only, and it serves solely to improve route calculation. Legal basis is your consent given by submitting (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR); if you skip the prompt, none of this data is transmitted.

9. Content, photos & communication (app)

To provide the community features (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) we process content you actively post: profile picture and bio, feed posts (text and photos), comments and reactions, photo galleries for public places, shared routes, and friend connections. This also covers your communication: direct messages and crew chat, each as text, image attachment and voice message, plus the permissions with which you allow individual people to send you images. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted on our servers – they are transmitted encrypted, but stored in plain text so the app can deliver them. Photos you upload for drive stat cards are processed solely to create that image.

Photos are processed server-side: every uploaded image is resized, re-encoded as JPEG and stripped of its EXIF metadata in the process – so the GPS coordinates and capture times frequently contained in photos are neither stored nor disclosed. This applies to all image uploads: profile and crew pictures, feed photos, place galleries, and image attachments in direct messages and crew chat.

Who can see your content – and what is public without signing in: posts, messages and drives are in principle visible only to the recipients you choose (crew members, chat partners, or the audience you select for a post). There are, however, four views that can be opened on the web without an account and without signing in. They are excluded from search engines (noindex), but anyone who knows the address can open them:

• Your profile at drivebattle.com/u/<display name>. Reachable purely by knowing your display name – even if you never shared a link yourself. Visible are: display name, bio, profile picture, sign-up date, level and points, crown or champion emblem, your unlocked badges, your position in the global leaderboard, and the totals for number of drives, total kilometres, total duration and top speed. Not visible are your email address, individual drives, routes, privacy zones and vehicles. If you have disabled the display of your top speed, that value is omitted here as well. Once you delete or deactivate your account, the page can no longer be opened.
• Crew profiles at drivebattle.com/crews/<number>, showing the crew name, key figures, leaderboard position and the member list (members' display name, profile picture, level).
• Routes you share at drivebattle.com/r/<token>, if you share a route as a link: route name, your display name, distance, duration, number of curves and the course of the route. The course is trimmed by your privacy zones before it is stored; no reference to the underlying drive is disclosed. The link contains a random token, is only valid while link sharing is active, expires after 90 days, and becomes permanently invalid when you revoke the share.
• Live location links at drivebattle.com/live/<token> – see section 7: shows your live location in real time for as long as the share you granted is running.

The latter three views only come into existence if you share something yourself, and can be ended at any time. The profile at /u/<display name>, by contrast, is part of the public competition; choose your display name and bio accordingly.

Moderation of reported content: when a user reports content, we store the report together with the reason, the reporting person and the authoring person. If we remove content, we keep a copy (text and image) in an internal moderation archive. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in a safe, lawful platform and in being able to substantiate our decisions (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); for other users the content is no longer visible from the moment of removal. Access is restricted to administrators. Retention is 180 days; afterwards the archive entry is deleted automatically unless ongoing proceedings require otherwise.

10. Push notifications (app)

Push notifications (e.g. new comments, crew activity, messages) are delivered via a self-hosted notification service on our own servers – not via Google Firebase or other third parties. Each notification type can be disabled individually in the app settings. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

11. Place search and map data queries (app)

The in-app place search primarily uses a local place index on our server. Only if no match is found there, our server forwards the entered search term to Nominatim (OpenStreetMap Foundation). Your IP address is not transmitted to Nominatim, as the request originates from our server (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

To display speed camera locations we likewise use a local dataset on our server. Purely as a fallback – if that dataset is unavailable – our server queries the map area as a rectangular extent (rounded grid, not an individual position) from Overpass/OpenStreetMap. Here too the request originates from our server and your IP address is not transmitted (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

12. Traffic data (TomTom)

For traffic jam, accident and roadworks reports – and, as a premium feature, for colouring your route by traffic conditions – we use the service TomTom (TomTom International B.V., Amsterdam, Netherlands). TomTom is based in the EU, so no transfer to a third country takes place for this. These queries run via our server; your IP address is not disclosed to TomTom. Location information is transmitted, however:

• Traffic reports: the displayed or travelled map area as a rectangular extent, rounded to a 0.1 degree grid (roughly 11 km) – not an individual position.
• Route evaluation: the surrounding area of the calculated route options as a rectangular extent (with roughly 5 km of margin), in order to determine the genuinely fastest route – again not an individual position.
• Traffic colouring of the route (premium): here individual points of your planned route are queried as exact coordinates – thinned out to at most 60 points, roughly 700 m apart. This is the most precise location information we transmit to a third party. Only the planned course of the route is transmitted, not your actual position and no recorded drive. The feature is optional, switched off by default, and can be turned off in the navigation cockpit at any time; while it is off, this query does not happen.

Legal basis is the provision of the feature you requested and our legitimate interest in usable traffic information (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR). No account, user or vehicle identifiers are sent along – TomTom therefore cannot attribute the queries to a person. We do not build any traffic history: responses are held in our servers' memory for at most 5 minutes and are never written to a database.

13. Automated support replies (AI)

When you submit a support request through the app or the website, we first attempt to answer it automatically. For this we use the language model Claude from Anthropic PBC (San Francisco, USA) via its paid commercial interface (Claude API). Every automated reply is labelled as such in the app and on the web; a human from our team reads along and can take over at any time. You can explicitly ask for a human at any point – your request is then passed to us without any further automated reply.

What is transmitted to Anthropic – the transfer runs exclusively via our server; your IP address is not disclosed to Anthropic:

• the text of your request together with its subject, category and the most recent messages of the ticket history,
• a summary of your account exactly as you see it yourself in the app: display name, language, app version, account creation date, premium status, XP, total kilometres, your vehicles (type, make, model) and the names of your crews,
• on request during the conversation, details of your own drives: date, distance, duration, speed, elevation gain, curves, lean angle, personal bests, badges and maintenance intervals,
• if you ask about the course of a drive, additionally the names of the places that drive passed through – in the same truncated form your crew sees (your privacy zones are cut out beforehand). Coordinates and raw GPS data are never transmitted.

Not transmitted: your email address, your password, your two-factor data, the coordinates of your privacy zones, your GPS tracks, and any other user's data. The lookup functions are technically bound to your account; the model cannot query anyone else's. Questions concerning other people are handed off to a human automatically.

Third-country transfer: Anthropic is based in the USA. We have entered into Anthropic's Data Processing Addendum (DPA) including the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, which forms part of its Commercial Terms of Service (Art. 28 and Art. 46 GDPR). Anthropic is additionally certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

No use for training: for the commercial interface we use, it is contractually the case that your inputs and the replies are not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic retains the content only temporarily to prevent misuse and to debug, and deletes it thereafter according to the commercial data retention periods. The training and five-year retention rules that apply to consumer plans (Claude Free/Pro/Max) do not apply here.

Legal basis and scope: the processing serves to handle your request (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in fast support handling (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). At most five automated replies are generated per ticket, and at most 20 runs per account per day. The request text and the generated reply are additionally stored in our internal support log so that we can review and correct automated replies. No automated decision with legal effect within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR takes place – the AI answers questions; it makes no decisions about your account, your content or moderation measures.

14. Error and crash reports

If an error occurs in the app or on the server, a technical error report (error message, stack trace, app version, your user ID where applicable) is transmitted to and stored on our server to find and fix bugs (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR – legitimate interest in a stable service). No third-party analytics or advertising services are involved. Error reports are deleted automatically after 90 days. If you delete your account before then, the link to your user ID is removed (the purely technical report remains anonymised until the 90 days have elapsed).

15. Retention & account deletion

We store drives and GPS tracks for as long as your account exists – with no time limit. That is the core of the service: you should be able to review your history, your statistics and your leaderboard figures at any time (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). You stay in control: you can delete each drive individually in the app – the corresponding GPS track is deleted with it – and deleting your account removes all drives and tracks. Your live position is not historised: it is continuously overwritten, is treated as stale after a few minutes without an update, and is removed when your account is deleted.

At a glance: unverified accounts 24 hours · deactivated accounts 30 days until final deletion · moderation archive of removed content 180 days · error reports 90 days · server logs at most 7 days · TomTom traffic data at most 5 minutes (memory only) · support requests visible to you in the app for 30 days after the last activity, and retained beyond that in the internal support history as a record of how the request was handled · support content transmitted to Anthropic only temporarily for misuse prevention, with no use for training (section 13) · drives, tracks and content for the lifetime of your account.

You can delete your account yourself in the app at any time. Your account is immediately deactivated and hidden from all other users, and permanently and irreversibly deleted after 30 days – together with your drives, tracks, content and messages. If you sign in again within that period, the account is reactivated. Excluded is information we must retain to comply with legal obligations or to substantiate moderation decisions: if content you authored was reported or removed, the display name used at that time remains stored with the report (see section 9) so the decision stays verifiable. Individual drives and posts can be deleted directly in the app at any time. Alternatively, you can request deletion by email to [email protected].

16. Your rights

You have the right to access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and objection (Art. 21). You may withdraw any consent (e.g. location access) at any time with effect for the future. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority; the authority responsible for us is the Data Protection Commissioner of North Rhine-Westphalia (LDI NRW).