Privacy Policy for Distance Goal

Distance Goal is published by Bluetorch Consulting Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (Companies House number 14663890). This privacy policy explains, in plain English, how the Distance Goal app for Android and iPhone handles your information.

If you have any questions about this policy, you can contact us at support@bluetorch.co.uk.

Distance Goal is a distance goal tracker. You create a goal with a target distance and a date window, then log distance entries for activities such as walking, cycling or running, and the app shows your progress. You can share a progress card — a picture of your ring — and a link that lets someone else start the same goal on their own phone.

Distance Goal has no accounts and no server. The app makes no network connections at all.

The app stores only the information you type into it, locally on your device:

• Goals: a name, a target distance, a start and end date, the activity types you choose, any optional balance limits you set, and your on/off choices for optional auto-tracking and reminders
• Distance entries: a date, a distance, an activity type, and an optional note
• On Android, if you use the optional Health Connect feature: the activity labels you set by hand on auto-tracked distance (a time period and the activity you chose), and the app ids of any Health Connect source apps you excluded

All of this is kept in local storage on your device. There is no cloud copy of it, no account, and no synchronisation between your devices — if you get a new phone, this data does not follow you unless you export a backup and restore it yourself. Bluetorch Consulting Ltd never receives any of it.

Distance Goal does not:

• Make any network connection — there is no server, no account and no sync. When you share a card, share a link or export a copy of your data, the app hands what you chose to your phone's own share sheet, and the app you pick from it does the sending
• Collect any personal data, usage data or advertising identifiers — nothing you do in the app is measured or reported to us or to anyone else
• Require an account — there is no sign-up, no login, no username and no profile, so nobody can search for you
• Collect GPS or location data, or use any sensor
• Use analytics, advertising, crash reporting or tracking services, or include any third-party SDK that transmits data
• Send notifications unless you turn reminders on — and then they are scheduled on your phone, with no server or push service
• Read from any health platform unless you turn auto-tracking on (Android only). On iPhone the app reads no health data at all: there is no auto-tracking, and it never asks for access to Apple Health
• Sell, rent or hand your information to anyone

Everything you enter into Distance Goal is stored locally on your device. Your goals, your distance entries, your notes, your badges and your history are never uploaded, synchronised or backed up to any service operated by Bluetorch Consulting Ltd, because there is none.

Because your data lives only on your device, deleting the app or clearing its app data may permanently delete your goals and distance entries. Your device may include the app's data in backups that you control — an Android backup to your Google account, or an iPhone backup to iCloud. Those are features of your device and your own account settings, not of this app.

Distance Goal never collects GPS location data and never tracks your route. It has no integration with Google Fit, Apple Health, Fitbit, Strava, or similar platforms, and it reads nothing from any health or fitness service unless you switch on the optional Health Connect feature described below.

Optional Health Connect auto-tracking (Android only). You can choose to turn on auto-tracking in the app's settings. If you do, Distance Goal reads your distance and the activity type of the workouts you tracked — and nothing else — from Google Health Connect, so your goals can update themselves from distance your phone, or a connected watch or fitness app, has already recorded.

• Off by default — nothing is read until you turn the setting on and grant permission in Health Connect.
• Two read-only permissions, and no more. The app never writes anything to Health Connect.
• Read distance — for each distance reading: how far it was, when it started and ended, which app recorded it, and whether that app recorded it automatically in the background or from an activity you started.
• Read exercise — used only to work out whether a stretch of distance was a walk, a ride or a run. Health Connect's distance records don't say, so without it the app can't tell your cycling from your walking, and a cycling goal would count both. From a workout the app reads exactly four things: its start time, end time, activity type, and which app recorded it. It does not read your route or GPS trace, your heart rate, laps, splits or calories, or the workout's title or notes.
• Knowing which app recorded something is what lets the app show you what your total is made of, let you exclude a source you don't trust, and tell two apps apart when they both recorded the same walk. The app cannot see steps, sleep, weight or anything else, and never asks for them.
• What period is read — only the span your auto-tracking goals cover: from the start of the earliest to the end of the latest, plus a few hours either side so a workout running past midnight can still be identified. If two of your goals have a gap between them, that gap falls inside the span and is read too.
• On your device — everything read is used to work out your goal progress. We never receive any of it, and it is never sold, used for advertising, or given to anyone else.
• No individual reading is kept. Health Connect's own records — each distance reading and each workout — are never copied into the app's storage. They are re-read from Health Connect every time, and disappear from the app the moment you turn auto-tracking off.
• One figure per day is kept, and here is why. So that a badge you have earned can never be taken away by a source app deleting its history, the app banks a single number for each calendar day: the furthest it has ever seen you go that day. Where you use auto-tracking, that number can include distance that came from Health Connect. It is a total for a day — never a workout, a route, a time of day, or which app recorded it.
• Activity labels you set are saved on your device. Many apps record distance without recording a workout, so the app can't always tell what an activity was — you can label those yourself. That label (the exact time period of the distance you were labelling, taken from Health Connect, plus the activity you picked) is saved on your device like any other setting and can be erased at any time with Settings → Reset activity labels.
• Your source choices are a local setting — if you exclude a source, or turn on “ignore automatic distance”, that preference (including the app id of any excluded source, for example com.sec.android.app.shealth) is saved on your device like any other setting.
• Reversible at any time — turn auto-tracking off in the app (reading stops immediately), or revoke either permission in the Health Connect app. Refusing the exercise permission is fine: the app simply can't tell your activities apart, and counts all auto-tracked distance toward every auto-tracking goal.

Auto-tracking supplements manual logging; it never replaces it.

The only ways any of it can leave your phone are the ones you start yourself. The app never sends anything read from Health Connect anywhere. A backup file you export includes your activity labels and source choices, and the day-by-day totals include days that auto-tracked distance contributed to. A progress card or a link for a goal that uses auto-tracking shows that goal's total distance, which can include Health Connect distance — as a single figure only, never a workout, a route, a time of day, or which app recorded it. See Sharing a card and a link and Exporting your data below.

You can optionally turn on reminders in the app's settings. When enabled, Distance Goal can show a notification if you haven't logged any distance for a day.

• Off by default — no notification is scheduled until you turn reminders on and grant the notification permission.
• On your device only — reminders are scheduled locally by your phone's operating system. There is no server, no push service and no account, and nothing about your reminders ever leaves your device.
• Reversible any time — turn reminders off in the app, or turn off notifications for Distance Goal in your phone's settings.

Distance Goal can make a progress card — a square image of one goal's progress ring — and a link that lets someone else start the same goal on their own phone. You choose whether to share either, and where it goes. The app never sends anything anywhere itself: it hands the card or the link to your phone's share sheet, and the app you choose from it — a chat, a message, an email — does the sending.

• You start it, every time — nothing is made or shared until you open Share progress on a goal and tap Share my progress or Copy the message. There is no automatic, scheduled or background sharing.
• What the card contains, exactly — the goal's name, its start and end dates, the percentage complete, how far you have gone against the target, and, if the goal was started from one of the built-in journeys, the name of that route and the point along it you have reached. That is the whole list. A card never contains an individual entry, a note, a date you exercised, or a badge. The image is drawn on your phone and shown to you before you share it, so you always see exactly what you are sending.
• What the link carries — the goal and your figures. Nothing else. The goal means: which built-in journey it is (if it is one), the target distance, the start and end dates, and the activities that count. Your figures mean: how far you have gone, what percentage of the goal that is, and the date that was true. Your figures always go with it: the picture shows them anyway, and they let the other person's app say how far you had got when you shared.
• What the link never carries — your name or any name; anything you typed, not even the goal's name (a built-in journey supplies its own name, and a custom goal is named afresh by the other person's app from its target and dates); your entries or notes; your other goals; your badges; your settings; anything about your phone; or anything that says who sent it. The person who receives it knows who sent it because they received it from you.
• The caption — when you share the link, the app writes a short line to go with it, built only from the figures on the card and the goal's name, for example “I'm 42% of the way to Hadrian's Wall Path — 42 km so far. Start the same goal on Distance Goal and let's keep each other going:” followed by the link. You can change or delete the caption in the app you send it from.
• On Android, the distance figure can include Health Connect distance. The distance on the card and in the link is the goal's total — the same figure as on your ring. If that goal uses auto-tracking, the total can include distance that came from Health Connect. It is a single total only: never a workout, an activity type, a route, a time of day, or which app recorded it. On iPhone there is no auto-tracking, so the figure is what you logged by hand.
• A link is a link — anyone who has it can open it, see the figures in it, and start the goal. Send it to the people you want to have it, the way you would a photo.
• When someone opens the link — it points at a page on this website. The details of the goal sit in the part of the address after the #, which a phone or browser never sends to a website, so our website sees that the page was opened and nothing else. On a phone with Distance Goal installed, the app opens instead and offers to start the goal.
• The website counts link views, without knowing who tapped. The page records that a link was opened, which built-in journey it was for (if any), and whether it included progress — never the figures, and never anything about the person who opened it. This counting is done in aggregate, without cookies, and cannot identify anyone. The app itself sends nothing, and does not know whether a link was ever opened.
• Receiving a link only ever adds a goal. Opening a link on your phone shows you the goal first, and starts it only if you tap Start this goal. It cannot change or delete anything already on your phone, and nothing about your phone is sent back to the sender or to us.
• Temporary files are cleaned up — each progress card leaves a single image in the app's own cache area, replaced by the next one and removable by your phone at any time.

Distance Goal can hand you a copy of everything you've logged — as a spreadsheet, a document, a note, or a backup file you can restore later. Like sharing, this never happens on its own, and each copy only goes where you send it.

• You start it, every time — nothing is exported unless you choose a format on the Export your data screen. There is no automatic, scheduled or background export.
• The app does not upload your export — it writes the file into temporary storage on your phone and passes it to your phone's own share sheet. Exporting involves no server of ours whatsoever, because we have none.
• Where it ends up is your choice — you pick the destination from the share sheet. Once a copy is in another app, that copy is governed by that app's privacy policy, not this one. If you send an export to a cloud service, it is on that service's servers because you put it there.
• What an export can contain — depending on the format: your goals, your logged entries and their notes, the badges you've earned, and the app's day-by-day record of how far you went (which, on Android, includes distance from Health Connect if you use auto-tracking). A backup file also contains your activity labels and excluded-source choices. No export ever contains anything the app does not already store.
• Temporary files are cleaned up — each export leaves a single file in the app's own cache area, replaced by the next one and removable by your phone at any time.
• Restoring a backup only ever adds — it never overwrites or deletes what is already on your phone, and never changes your units, reminder or Health Connect settings.

Distance Goal does not use third-party analytics, advertising, crash reporting or tracking services, and does not share any information with third parties. It makes no network connections, so there is no hosting provider or server behind it.

The web page a shared link points to is part of this website, and this website counts how often that page is opened — in aggregate, without cookies, and without knowing who opened it, as described under Sharing a card and a link above.

The app is distributed through Google Play and the App Store. Google and Apple may collect information relating to your download and installation of the app under their own privacy policies, which are separate from this one.

Distance Goal is suitable for people aged 9 and over, and we have designed it so that a child using it is safe by default.

• Nobody can contact a child through the app — there is no chat, no messages, no comments, no profiles, no friend lists, and no way for one person to reach another inside the app. Sharing goes outward only: a card or a link, handed to a chat or messaging app the child — or you — already uses, under that app's rules.
• A link cannot carry a message — it carries only a goal and some figures. There is no way to put words, pictures or anything else into one, so nothing harmful can reach a child through a Distance Goal link.
• A child cannot be found — there is no account, no username, no profile, no search and no directory.
• No advertising, no analytics, no profiling and no nudge techniques. We do not build a profile of any user, child or adult, and there is nothing in the app designed to keep a child using it longer than they meant to.

Parents and guardians: a card or a link shows how far along a goal someone is, and nothing more. If a child shares one, it goes into whatever chat or app they choose, and that app's rules apply from there.

If you believe a child's information has reached us in a way it should not have, contact us at support@bluetorch.co.uk and we will remove it.

You are always in full control of deleting your data. You can:

• Delete individual goals or distance entries within the app
• Clear the app's data from your device settings (on Android: Settings → Apps → Distance Goal → Storage → Clear data)
• Uninstall the app, which removes its locally stored data

There is nothing to delete anywhere else, and no deletion request is possible or needed, because we hold no copy of anything.

If you used buddy groups in an earlier version. Versions of Distance Goal before 2.6.0 had an optional “buddy groups” feature that sent a few encrypted figures to a server we ran. That feature has been removed from the app, and the app no longer connects to that server. Whatever the server still holds cannot be read by us, is deleted automatically 60 days after it was last updated, and the server itself is being shut down once it is empty.

If the app's behaviour ever changes in a way that affects your privacy — for example, if a future version added an optional online feature — this policy will be updated before that version is released, and the effective date above will change. The current policy always applies to the current version of the app.

If you have questions about this privacy policy or about how Distance Goal handles your information, please contact: