RidgeLink Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 15, 2026 · Section 14 (Riders in Canada) added September 15, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains what information RidgeLink ("RidgeLink," "we," "us") collects, how we use it, and the choices you have. RidgeLink is a backcountry ride-community app for snowmobilers, dirt-bike / enduro riders, mountain bikers, side-by-side and ATV riders, hikers, and backcountry skiers. By creating an account or using the app, you agree to this policy.

1. Information we collect

Information you give us

• Account details: your name, email address, and password (stored only as a securely hashed value — we never store your plain-text password). If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive a unique identifier and basic profile info (name, email) from that provider instead of a password.
• Profile details: your chosen sport(s), skill level, bio, home area / location text, and profile photo.
• Content you create: map pins, snow reports, photos and videos, "zones," trails and GPS routes, ride-day plans, ride history, certifications, and the messages and comments you send.
• Safety Check-In details: when you use Safety Check-In, we collect your trip plan, planned return time, and the name and phone number of any emergency contact you add. By adding a contact, you confirm you have their permission to provide their number for this purpose. Contact details are used only for that trip's alerts and are deleted when you delete your account.
• Payment information: if you subscribe on our website, payment is processed by Stripe — we never receive or store your card number, only Stripe's customer and subscription identifiers. If you subscribe on iPhone, Apple processes the payment and tells us only that a subscription exists; we use RevenueCat to check and keep that subscription status, and RevenueCat receives your RidgeLink account ID as the identifier for it. Zone Tips are sold on our website through Stripe; they are not sold to riders with a Canadian billing address, and only sellers in the United States can offer one.
• Apple Health workouts (iOS, optional): if you import a ride from your Apple Watch, we read your recent workout list and the GPS route of the one workout you choose — read-only, in the foreground only, never in the background. After you first use the import, the app re-reads that recent workout list when you open or return to it, so a new watch workout can be offered as a one-tap import. See §5.
• Motion & fitness sensors (iOS app only): while you record a ride, with your permission we read your iPhone's motion sensors: the barometer, to measure elevation change more precisely than GPS alone, and — on hikes only — Core Motion's step count and walking distance, which are saved with that ride. These figures appear on your ride card and never rank on any leaderboard.

Information collected automatically

• Precise location (GPS): with your permission, we use your device's location to center the map, show nearby riders and conditions, match ride days by distance, record GPS routes you choose to track, power Safety Check-In location pings, and to keep the approximate area on your profile current, which we refresh from your device whenever you open the app, so that distance-based features — nearby riders, ride-day matching, local conditions — keep working. That area is never shown to other riders as a point on the map. You can turn location off at any time in your device settings; some features will be limited.
• Product analytics: we record a small, fixed list of in-app events — that the app was opened, which screen you landed on, which path you signed up through, that the Calendar was opened, that a race was tapped or its sign-up link followed, that you RSVP'd to a race, that a practice filter or practice alerts were used, and that the Pro offer was shown — tied to your account ID. The list is fixed in our code; the app cannot send anything else. These events carry no free text, no coordinates, no message contents, and no email address, and we use them only to see which parts of RidgeLink are useful and which are broken.
• Push notification tokens: if you allow notifications, your device gives us an anonymous token that Apple's push service uses to deliver alerts to your phone. It identifies the device, not you. Turning notifications off in your device settings stops the alerts, and the token is deleted when you delete your account.
• Photos and videos you upload: some photos are re-encoded on your device before they are uploaded, which drops the metadata your camera wrote into the file, including any GPS tag; other photos, and all videos, are uploaded as your device recorded them and may still carry that metadata. Uploaded files are stored as objects with long, unguessable web addresses; anyone holding the exact address can open the file, so a photo you marked friends-only is hidden in the app but the underlying file is not password-protected. Do not upload anything you would not want reachable by its address.
• Technical & error data: to keep the app working we use Sentry for crash/error monitoring, which may collect device, browser, and error information when something goes wrong. We configure it to avoid capturing your precise location or account details (see §14.9 for exactly how).

2. How we use your information

• To provide the app: show the map, pins, photos, snow/trail conditions, and the social features (matching, messaging, friends, groups, calendar).
• To find and show nearby riders, ride days, and content based on distance.
• To operate Safety Check-In and overdue escalation: track your trip timer on our server and, if you become overdue, alert the emergency contacts you chose and — only if you opt in for that trip — nearby riders.
• To process and manage your RidgeLink Pro subscription and Zone Tip purchases (via Stripe).
• To keep the community safe: review reports, act on blocks, and prevent abuse.
• To diagnose and fix errors and improve reliability.
• To send you in-app notifications about activity relevant to you (ride requests, messages, likes, etc.).

3. How your information is shared

We do not sell your personal information. Information is shared only:

• With other users — by design. Your profile (name, avatar, sport, skill, bio, general location, public reputation) and any content you post publicly is visible to other riders. Content you mark private or friends-only is limited accordingly. Your email, exact home coordinates, and payment details are not shown to other users.
• Community safety alerts (opt-in): if you turn on community alerts for a trip and become overdue, nearby riders may be shown your first name, sport, general area, and that you need help — never your phone number, home location, full route, or profile.
• With service providers that operate the app on our behalf (see §8).
• For legal reasons — if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and property of RidgeLink, our users, or the public.

4. Location information, sharing, and the features that use it

RidgeLink is a mapping and rider-safety app, so location is central to how it works. You grant or revoke location permission in your device or browser settings at any time.

Everything that shares your position with another person is off until you turn it on.

• Group sharing and friend-to-friend sharing let people you choose see your position on the map while you have it enabled. You can only share with a group you belong to or a rider you are already friends with. Broadcasting your own position is a Pro feature; seeing a friend's shared position is free. While sharing is on we keep a breadcrumb trail of the last 48 hours (and at most the last 1,000 points). Turning a share off clears the stored point for that audience, and turning off your last remaining share deletes the trail.
• Safety Check-In sends location pings only while a trip you armed is running, and stops when you check in or end the trip. Those pings are part of the trip record (§10).
• Ride recording records a GPS track only while you are recording. When you publish a ride we trim roughly 150 m from each end, so your start and finish — often your home or your truck — are not exposed. Rides you keep private are stored whole.
• Background location runs only while a safety trip is armed or a recording is live, never passively, and iOS shows its own indicator while it does.

When you post a pin, photo, or zone at a location, that location is shared according to the visibility you choose. We do not show your exact stored home coordinates to other riders.

Riders in Canada: §14.8 lists every function that locates or profiles you and where to switch each one off.

5. Apple Health (Apple Watch import) — iOS app only

If you record rides on an Apple Watch, the RidgeLink iOS app can bring one of those workouts in as a ride. This is the only place RidgeLink touches Apple Health, and it is strictly read-only — the app never writes anything into Health, and never changes or deletes anything already there.

• What we read: exactly two kinds of Health data — Workouts saved in Health from the last ~90 days, whether recorded by your Apple Watch, your iPhone, or another fitness app (activity type, date and time, duration, distance, the name of the device that recorded it, and which app wrote it to Health) and Workout Routes (the GPS track of the one workout you pick — for each fix, its latitude and longitude, the time it was taken, and, where the watch recorded them, its elevation, speed, and GPS accuracy). We do not request access to heart rate, energy burned, steps, sleep, body measurements, medical records, or any other Health category, so iOS never offers them to us.
• When we read it: only in the foreground, never on a schedule, and never until you have used the import yourself and iOS has asked your permission. Your recent workout list (about the last 90 days) is read when you open Import from Watch → Apple Health and tap Show my watch workouts — and, once you have used the import, when you open or return to the app, so a new watch workout can be offered as a one-tap import. The GPS route is read only after you select one workout and choose to import it.
• What happens to it: the route of the workout you selected is converted on your device into a standard GPS track and uploaded to your own RidgeLink account as a ride — the same path as a GPS file you pick from your phone yourself. The workout list stays on your device; only the one ride you choose is uploaded. Once uploaded it is stored with the same hosting and database providers that hold the rest of your rides (§8), which act only on our instructions.
• How we use it: to create that ride and the things a ride gives you — distance, duration, elevation, top speed, and your ride history — and, when the workout was recorded by your Apple Watch's own Workout app, to treat it exactly like a ride recorded in the app: its lap and segment times post to RidgeLink's leaderboards, its miles count on rider and crew mileage boards, and, only if you ask for it afterward, it can claim RidgeClaim territory. Nothing else.
• Your route line stays private; your times post to boards — please read this: every imported ride arrives private: its map line, start point, and speed trace are visible to no one but you unless you later publish the ride. Its times work like any recorded ride's: if your Apple Watch's own Workout app recorded the workout, its lap times and laps post to leaderboards when you import it — including boards other signed-in riders can see, where entries show your name, avatar, and time (never your route line), and a rider whose time you beat is notified. You can remove your time from any board from that board's page, and deleting the ride removes the ride and every time and lap derived from it. Rides imported from GPS files, or workouts written to Health by third-party apps, never reach any board other riders can see: they stay private, time only your own private lines, and RidgeLink refuses to publish them.
• Never sold, never advertising: we do not sell Apple Health data or the rides derived from it, and we do not share or disclose it to third parties for their own purposes — including advertising networks, data brokers, and information resellers. We do not use it for advertising, marketing, use-based data mining, or research, and we do not use it to make or inform decisions about insurance, employment, or credit. We do not store Health data in iCloud.
• Your controls: you can turn RidgeLink's Health access off at any time in Settings → Health → Data Access & Devices → RidgeLink; the import then finds no workouts and the one-tap offer stops. Deleting an imported ride in RidgeLink deletes the route we imported, and deleting your account removes it with the rest of your data (§10). Removing a ride from RidgeLink changes nothing in Apple Health — your original workout stays where it is.

Apple Health is available only in the RidgeLink iOS app. The RidgeLink website and the Android app have no access to Apple Health data at all. Residents of states with consumer-health-data laws (including Washington and Nevada): see our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

6. Safety features — important limitations

7. Your privacy rights (including California)

• Sensitive information: precise geolocation — and any Apple Health workout data you import (§5) — is treated as "sensitive personal information" under California law (CPRA). We use it only to provide the features described above and for security — not to infer characteristics about you, and not for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• No sale or sharing: we do not sell or "share" (as defined by the CPRA) your personal information.
• Your rights: depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or obtain a copy of your personal information, to opt out of sale/sharing, and to limit the use of sensitive information. We honor these requests and will not discriminate against you for exercising them. To make a request, contact us (§13).

8. Third-party services

Ridge Link LLC is a company in the United States, and RidgeLink runs in the United States. Your account, your profile, your rides and GPS tracks, your photos, your messages, your emergency contacts, your safety trips and their location pings, and your subscription status are stored and processed in the United States by us and by the providers listed in §14.4, and may be subject to access by United States courts, law enforcement and national-security authorities under United States law. Some map, place-name and weather lookups also reach providers in Europe and Canada; those carry a coordinate or a map tile request, never your name, email, or account. Riders in Canada: see §14.3.

The table in §14.4 lists every provider we rely on, what reaches it, where it is, and whether it is reached from our servers or from your device. Each provider has its own privacy practices.

Apple Health is not a provider we send data to — it is storage on your own device that the iOS app reads from at your request (§5).

9. Your choices and controls

• Access & edit: you can view and edit your profile and content in the app.
• Apple Health: turn RidgeLink's Health access on or off in Settings → Health → Data Access & Devices → RidgeLink.
• Delete your account: from Profile → Danger Zone → Delete my account. This permanently deletes your profile and avatar, your rides and GPS tracks, your pins, photos and videos (including the stored files themselves), your messages, zones, routes, saved places, ride history, certifications, leaderboard and lap times, territory, local posts, friendships, notifications, blocks, your saved and emergency contacts, your safety trips and their location pings, your sharing records, your push tokens, your share links, your race RSVPs, any unused sign-in links, and your record of accepting the Terms. Groups you own are dissolved. Analytics events (§1) stay as counts with the link to your account removed. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.
• One thing is kept: the safety trip event log. It is an append-only record of what the safety system did and when — a nudge sent, an escalation, a contact notified — and it cannot be rewritten or deleted by design, because a forensic trail you can edit is not a forensic trail. It keeps the trip number and your account number, which no longer resolve to anything once your account is gone, and the type and time of each event. Since September 15, 2026 no name, phone number or email is written into it; entries written before that date may carry the name of an emergency contact who was notified, and cannot be edited.
• Get a copy of your data: while signed in on our website, open ridgelink.app/api/me/export to download everything on your account as a JSON file — your profile, pins, rides and their track points, routes, times, posts, and the rest of what you made. Or ask us (§13) and we will send it within 30 days at no cost.
• Location & sharing: turn location access on or off in your device settings, and turn trip/group/friend location sharing on or off in the app.
• Report & block: you can report content and block other riders from within the app.
• Requests: to make a privacy request or ask a question, contact us (§13).

10. How long we keep information, how we protect it, and what happens if something goes wrong

How long we keep things. We do not run scheduled deletions of account data: what is on your account stays until you delete the item or the account, except where a shorter period is stated below.

Who is responsible. Our person in charge of the protection of personal information (§13, §14.2) approves these practices, decides access, correction and deletion requests, handles complaints, and decides what happens after an incident.

How we protect it. Passwords are stored only as a salted hash, never in readable form. Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Sessions are handled with server-side tokens. Password-reset and email-verification links are stored only as a hash of the token, are single-use, and expire. Other riders see only the limited public parts of your profile — never your email, your exact home coordinates, your payment identifiers, or your private settings. Our crash reporter is configured to send no IP address and no cookies, and to strip email addresses and coordinate-shaped numbers out of error text, request URLs and navigation breadcrumbs before anything leaves your device or our server. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure.

If a confidentiality incident happens. If personal information we hold is lost, accessed, used, or disclosed without authorization, we take reasonable steps to reduce the harm and to prevent it happening again, record the incident in our incident register, and notify you and the applicable authorities as the law requires. Riders in Canada: §14.10 sets out the Canadian rules we follow.

If you want to complain. Write to us (§13). We acknowledge within 5 business days and answer within 30 days. If our answer does not satisfy you and you are in Canada, see §14.7.

11. Children's privacy

RidgeLink is intended for riders aged 16 and older and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16, and we do not accept accounts from riders under 16. If you believe someone under 16 has given us information, contact us and we will delete it. In Québec, the personal information of a child under 14 may be collected only with the consent of a parent or guardian, and information about a minor is never used for commercial prospecting.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will revise the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, notify you in the app. Continued use of RidgeLink after changes take effect means you accept the updated policy.

13. Contact us — and who is responsible for your information

RidgeLink is operated by Ridge Link LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company.

Person in charge of the protection of personal information (Privacy Officer): the founder and managing member of Ridge Link LLC — sledlines@gmail.com. Write there for any question about this policy, any access, correction, deletion, de-indexing or portability request, any complaint, and any request to have a person review an automated decision. We answer within 30 days.

Responsable de la protection des renseignements personnels : le fondateur et membre gérant de Ridge Link LLC — sledlines@gmail.com.

14. Riders in Canada

Added September 15, 2026. This section is additional to everything above. Where it differs from another section of this policy, this section governs for riders in Canada.

14.1 Which laws apply to you

RidgeLink is offered to riders in Canada, so the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) applies to us. If you live in Québec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (CQLR c P-39.1, as amended by Law 25) also applies. If you live in Alberta or British Columbia, your province's Personal Information Protection Act may apply as well. These laws apply to us regardless of our size, our revenue, or the fact that we are a United States company.

14.2 Who is responsible for your personal information

Ridge Link LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, decides why and how your personal information is collected and used.

Person in charge of the protection of personal information
(Responsable de la protection des renseignements personnels)

Write to that person for any question about this policy, any access, correction, deletion, de-indexing or portability request, any complaint, and any request to have a human review an automated decision.

14.3 Where your information is stored, and which borders it crosses

RidgeLink runs in the United States. Your account, your profile, your rides and GPS tracks, your photos and videos, your messages, your emergency contacts, your safety trips and their location pings, and your subscription status are stored and processed in the United States, by us and by the providers listed in §14.4.

This means your personal information is communicated outside your province and outside Canada as soon as you use RidgeLink, and while it is there it may be accessed by United States courts, law enforcement and national-security authorities under United States law — including the CLOUD Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — which is not the law of your province or of Canada, and which does not give you the same avenues of complaint that Canadian law does.

Each provider's terms bind it to protect the information and to use it only to provide its service to us. You can ask us at sledlines@gmail.com for a description of what is sent to each provider, for what, and what protects it, and we will send it.

Two categories of lookup leave the United States, and neither carries your name, email, or account:

• Map tiles and terrain are fetched by your device directly from our mapping vendors, so those vendors receive your device's IP address and the map area you are looking at.
• Canadian trail, Crown-land, park and protected-area data comes from Canadian federal and provincial open-data services. Those requests are made by our servers, not your device, and carry only a coordinate.

14.4 Our service providers, what each receives, and where

Not a provider: Apple Health is storage on your own device that the iOS app reads at your request (§5). We do not send anything to it.

Off in Canada. Text-message (SMS) alerts to emergency contacts and Stolen Vehicle Alerts are switched off for everyone and are not offered to riders in Canada. Zone Tips are not sold to a rider with a Canadian billing address, and only sellers in the United States can offer one. If any of these is ever enabled for Canada, this policy will be updated first.

No advertising, no sale. We do not sell your personal information, we do not disclose it to data brokers or advertising networks, and we do not use your location, your rides, or your Apple Health data for advertising or profiling for advertising.

14.5 How long we keep your information

The full schedule is in §10. In summary: we keep your account and the things in it until you delete them or delete your account; the live location share and its breadcrumb trail are kept for the short, stated periods in that table; and sign-in sessions and one-time links expire on their own.

14.6 Your rights in Canada, and how to use them

Write to sledlines@gmail.com for any of these. Tell us which right you are exercising. We answer within 30 days, free of charge. If your request is complex and we need longer, we will tell you before the 30 days are up, why, and when to expect an answer. If we refuse, we will tell you in writing why, which provision we rely on, who to contact, and that you may ask the regulator to review our decision.

• Access. Get a copy of the personal information we hold about you, in a readable form, and be told how we use it, how long we keep it, and the categories of people and providers who have received it.
• Correction. Have information corrected if it is inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date. You can edit most of it yourself in the app. If we have disclosed the information to anyone, we will tell them about the correction where that is possible.
• Deletion. Delete your account and the personal information tied to it, yourself, from Profile → Danger Zone → Delete my account. §9 says exactly what that removes and the one thing that is kept.
• Withdrawal of consent. Turn off location, any sharing, push notifications, or any optional feature at any time, in the app or in your device settings. Some features stop working when you do. Withdrawing consent does not undo what was already lawfully done.
• Portability (Québec). Ask for the computerized personal information you gave us in a structured, commonly used technical format. While signed in on our website you can download it yourself as a JSON file (§9), or write to us and we will send it.
• De-indexing and cessation of dissemination (Québec). Ask us to stop disseminating personal information about you, or to de-index a link to it, where the dissemination causes you serious injury to your reputation or privacy and stopping it is not outweighed by the public's interest in knowing or by freedom of expression. Deleting a pin, photo, post or ride does this directly; write to us for anything you cannot remove yourself.
• Human review of an automated decision (Québec). See §14.8.
• Designate someone to act for you. A representative, a person authorized by law, or — after death — the people the law allows, may exercise these rights. We will ask for proof of identity and of authority before we act.

We do not charge for any of this, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

14.7 Complaints

Write to the person in charge (§14.2). We acknowledge within 5 business days and answer within 30 days, in writing, with reasons.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain to a regulator, and you may do that whether or not you complained to us first:

• Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — priv.gc.ca
• Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec — cai.gouv.qc.ca
• Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta — oipc.ab.ca
• Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia — oipc.bc.ca

14.8 Features that locate you or that build a picture of you

Québec law requires us to tell you, in plain terms, which features identify you, locate you, or profile you — and how to turn each one off. Every feature that shares your position with another person is off until you turn it on.

Automated decisions. Those rejections are made by software, without a person looking at them. We tell you which rule refused and why — on the board for a time or a lap, and in the app when a territory claim is refused. If you disagree, write to sledlines@gmail.com and a person will review it, tell you what information the decision was based on, and correct it if it was wrong. We do not use automated processing to decide anything about your account, your price, or your access to RidgeLink.

14.9 How we protect your information

Passwords are stored only as a salted hash, never in readable form. Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Sessions are handled with server-side tokens. Password-reset and email-verification links are stored only as a hash of the token, are single-use, and expire. Other riders see only the limited public parts of your profile — never your email, your exact home coordinates, your payment identifiers, or your private settings. Our crash reporter is configured to send no IP address and no cookies, and to strip email addresses and coordinate-shaped numbers out of error text, request URLs, navigation breadcrumbs and performance traces before anything leaves your device or our server. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure.

14.10 If something goes wrong — confidentiality incidents

If personal information we hold is lost, accessed, used, or disclosed without authorization, we take reasonable steps to reduce the harm and to prevent it happening again, and we record every such incident in an incident register, whatever its size.

• Québec: if the incident presents a risk of serious injury to you, we notify you and the Commission d'accès à l'information with diligence. We keep the register for 5 years.
• Rest of Canada: if the incident creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and notify you as soon as feasible, and we notify any other organization that can reduce the harm. We keep a record of every breach of security safeguards for 24 months, whether or not it was reportable.

The notice will tell you what happened, what information was involved, what we are doing, what you can do, and how to reach the person in charge.

14.11 Age

RidgeLink is for riders aged 16 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16, and we do not accept accounts from riders under 16. If you believe someone under 16 has given us information, write to sledlines@gmail.com and we will delete it.

In Québec, the personal information of a child under 14 may be collected only with the consent of a parent or guardian, and information about a minor may not be used for commercial prospecting; we do not accept accounts from anyone under 16 at all, and we do not send marketing to minors.

If you are 16 or 17, remember that the age of majority is 18 in Québec, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and 19 in BC, NB, NS, PEI, NL, NWT, Nunavut and Yukon. See Terms §21.14 (riders under the age of majority in Canada).

14.12 Emails and messages we send you — CASL

Under Canada's anti-spam legislation we may send you a commercial electronic message only with your consent or on a basis the law allows. What we actually send:

Every email we send says it is from Ridge Link LLC and tells you how to reach us. To stop non-essential email, write to sledlines@gmail.com. We cannot stop security and billing emails while you have an account, because they are how we tell you about your own account.

14.13 Language

This policy is available in French at ridgelink.app/privacy-fr.html. If you are in Québec and any difference between the French and English versions matters to you, you may rely on whichever version is more favourable to you. See Terms §21.10 (Langue / Language).