Your record. Your choices.

This Privacy Policy applies to the Trace iPhone application, Trace account services, public Trace sharing pages, and the Vex website pages that link to it. “Trace,” “Vex,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to Vex Technologies Inc., a New York corporation.

Trace is currently intended for an initial United States App Store release. This Policy describes the current release and the connected services configured for it. It does not apply to a third-party service you visit or use under that provider's own terms and privacy notice.

Questions and privacy requests may be sent to support@builtbyvex.com.

Trace saves your 18-or-older confirmation and the applicable policy version with a server timestamp; it does not ask for a date of birth for this confirmation.

Trace receives information directly from you, from your iPhone and permissions, from Apple or Google when you sign in with them, from Apple when you purchase or manage a subscription, from people who interact with you in Trace, and from the providers listed below.

Manual recording uses precise location and motion while a drive is active. If you enable automatic recording and grant the required permissions, Trace may use precise location in the background, including while the screen is locked or another app is open, and Motion & Fitness signals to distinguish vehicle travel from walking or stationary time.

The automatic-recording preference may appear enabled for a new account, but monitoring does not begin until you grant Always and Precise Location, Motion & Fitness, and the required device authorization. You can turn automatic recording off in Trace or change permissions in iOS Settings. Force-quitting Trace and iOS background limits can prevent recording.

Exact routes can be stored on your device and privately in your verified account. They are not made public merely because a drive was recorded. Live drive sharing, described in section 08, sends your position to other people only after you turn it on, and only while you record or navigate a drive. GPS, motion, elevation, distance, speed, and derived performance values are estimates and may be delayed, incomplete, or wrong.

• Verified account required. Trace uses Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google, or an email address and password. An email account works only after you enter the code we send to confirm the address, and we send a code again if you reset your password. Trace does not provide a guest account.
• Local first. Active and completed drive records, Garage information, selected media, and settings can be stored in an account-scoped area on your iPhone. Drives and Garage changes save there first, then sync to your account when a connection is available.
• Car cut-outs stay on your iPhone. When you add a vehicle photo, Trace can lift the car out of the background so it can be shown on its own, for example in Garage, on share cards and in the Garage widget. This uses Apple's on-device Vision framework. The cut-out is saved next to the original photo in Trace's storage on your iPhone, is excluded from iCloud backup, and a smaller copy is kept where the Home Screen widget and Live Activity can read it. Cut-outs are not uploaded to Trace or sent to Apple, and are not used to identify people. A cut-out is deleted with the photo it was made from, or when Trace's data on the device is deleted.
• Private account persistence. Eligible completed drives, routes, metrics, vehicle records, Garage history, private VIN and ownership fields, and selected sanitized media may be stored with Supabase so the verified owner can recover them. This is a standard account feature, not a Trace Pro benefit.
• Plan limits do not delete history. A plan can limit which drives you can open, not what Trace keeps. Older drives stay saved in your account, and export and deletion are account rights, not Trace Pro benefits.
• Detailed drives and raw routes are private. Recording does not publish the detailed record or route. However, when your profile and Stats visibility allow it, accepted friends can receive activity facts for eligible completed drives—completion time, distance, duration, and an available public vehicle summary—without a separate per-drive feed switch.
• Live drive sharing begins off. Trace asks before sharing a drive live with friends, and each club is a separate choice.
• Profile and aggregate Stats. New profiles and aggregate Stats can begin visible to other Trace users. You can change them to Private in Privacy Controls.
• Garage build visibility. A newly created vehicle can begin with Public selected in the vehicle editor. Review the visibility before saving. Private VIN, odometer, notes, routes, raw photos, maintenance, and modification history are not part of the current public-card payload.
• Product analytics begins off. Mixpanel processing begins only after you opt in.
• Mapbox telemetry begins off. Optional Mapbox telemetry is a separate control. Necessary map requests still occur when you use maps.

Global heatmap addendum, effective October 5, 2026 (heatmap-global-permanent-v3). This optional feature now permits a cell to appear with one eligible contributor and keeps contributed history without an age-based expiry. It requires a new, explicit global heatmap choice in the app; accepting the general policy or an earlier heatmap choice does not enable it. Earlier global enrollment is reset rather than carried into this policy. Friends heatmap sharing remains a separate choice under its existing rules.

Private drive recording works with global heatmap contribution off. If you expressly enable the current global choice, Trace removes at least the first and last 60 seconds and 500 meters along the route. It also excludes cells that touch the 500-meter departure or destination privacy areas, including when the route returns to those areas. Trace converts the remaining path into H3 resolution-8 route cells on your device before submission. The private contribution remains associated with your Trace account and is privacy-reduced, not guaranteed anonymous.

A cell is eligible for the public global heatmap only after at least 24 hours from submission and when at least one eligible contributor has shared it. Public output omits account identity, raw coordinates, raw routes, exact contributor count, vehicle identity, and speed. Trace retains private account-linked coarse cell contributions, receipt timestamps, and idempotency records so it can remove your contributions later; the global contribution payload does not contain raw route coordinates. Eligible public cells and these private receipts do not expire merely because they are old.

You can turn global contribution off in Privacy Controls. Turning it off deletes your retained global contributions and immediately invalidates their affected public cells; cells contributed by other eligible people can be rebuilt from their independent contributions. Contribution deletion and account deletion also retract the affected history. Changing global contribution does not change your friends heatmap choice, and Ghost mode does not change it either. Trace's viewer cache uses a short server lease capped at 60 seconds; permanent storage does not grant indefinite access to a withdrawn contribution through Trace. Trace cannot recall a screenshot or external copy already created.

• authenticate the correct account, including sending email confirmation and password-reset codes, and keep account data separated;
• record, recover, finalize, map, organize, and privately preserve drives and Garage records;
• apply privacy, sharing, social, safety, notification, and subscription choices;
• provide friends, clubs, leaderboards, reports, blocks, referrals, public cards, live drives you turn on, and selected share features;
• process an optional heatmap contribution or optional product analytics only after the applicable choice;
• present and verify purchases and entitlements when Trace Pro is offered;
• produce a requested account export or deletion workflow;
• prevent fraud, abuse, unsafe use, and security incidents; comply with law; and enforce our terms; and
• answer support, privacy, safety, and website inquiries.

Trace does not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, display targeted advertising, or use identified drive, location, or vehicle records to train a general-purpose artificial-intelligence model.

Operational clarification, October 5, 2026. Build 24 uses Trace-owned paywalls and Apple StoreKit; it does not initialize the Superwall SDK or send account identity or plan attributes to Superwall. Trace retired server forwarding to Superwall on October 3, 2026. Older installed builds may retain their original SDK behavior. Historical provider records require separate erasure confirmation; removing the integration is not confirmation that those records were deleted. Contact support@builtbyvex.com for a request concerning historical processing.

Settings › About › Acknowledgements lists the open-source software, fonts and data sources Trace is built with, and their licenses. The list is part of the app and loads without contacting anyone. If you tap a source, it opens that organization's website in your browser, under that site's own practices.

Providers may process information under our instructions and their own security and legal obligations. Independent destinations you choose—such as a social network, messaging app, or a person who receives a share—operate under their own practices.

Trace may show your profile and aggregate Stats according to your selected visibility. For accepted, unblocked friends, the activity feed can include completion time, distance, duration, and an available public vehicle summary for eligible completed drives. The detailed drive and raw route remain private. Trace does not currently provide a separate per-drive switch for these activity facts.

Ghost mode. You can turn on Ghost mode from the map. While it is on, drives you record stay in your own history and private account storage, but Trace keeps them out of what other people can see: your friends' activity feed, your shared profile and Garage statistics, public vehicle-card statistics, peer calendars and leaderboards. A drive that overlaps any time Ghost mode was on is treated this way, even if it syncs later. Trace stores when Ghost mode was on and off on your iPhone, and marks each affected drive as hidden from friends when it syncs. Ghost mode does not change your separate global heatmap choice, a route you deliberately share, or a share card or film you export.

Live drives with friends and clubs. You can let friends, and members of clubs you choose, see you while you drive. It is off until you agree: Trace asks once, at the start of a drive, and you can change it at any time in Settings › Privacy & Data. Sharing with friends never turns on sharing with a club; each club is a separate choice, made on the club's screen or in Settings › Privacy & Data › Live drives in clubs, and Trace reminds you that club members may not be your friends. While you record or navigate a drive with sharing on, Trace sends your position about every 8 seconds while moving (about every 30 seconds when slow), with a short trail of the positions in between. The people you share with see your name, your 3D vehicle, your position, speed and direction, that short trail and, while you navigate, the route ahead and your arrival time. Friends can also see your live drive in CarPlay; club members who are not your friends cannot.

Who can see a live drive: the friends you had accepted when the drive started (not anyone you add during it), and members of each club you chose who had joined that club before the drive started, as long as you both still belong to it. People you have blocked, or who have blocked you, never see it. Unfriending, blocking, leaving a club, being removed from it, turning a club off or the club being deleted ends what that person or club can see straight away.

What a live drive never shares: anything while Ghost mode is on (turning it on stops sharing at once); positions within your privacy zones and 200 meters around them; within 400 meters of the Home and Work places you saved, of places where your recent drives often start or end, of where this drive started, and of a navigation destination other than a meetup (the shared route stops short of it too); and anything while the drive is paused or after about two minutes parked. Trace's servers also refuse any position, trail point or route segment inside a privacy zone. Sharing stops when the drive ends, when you sign out, when you turn it off or when you save a new privacy zone.

Contact discovery is optional and begins off. When you tap the contact-discovery action, Trace enables your own account for reciprocal matching, requests Contacts access, reads only email addresses and phone numbers, normalizes and hashes them on the device, uploads the hashes in bounded batches, and clears the raw working values. The hashes remain pseudonymous and account-linked, not anonymous. If permission or matching fails after discoverability was enabled, it can remain enabled. Operational clarification, October 5, 2026: in build 24, open Friends, choose the contact-discovery panel, and tap “Turn off contact discovery” to request that reciprocal matching be disabled. This is separate from the iOS Contacts permission. If the request fails, retry when connected or contact support@builtbyvex.com; a failed request is not confirmation that discovery is off.

Leaderboards begin off. Joining activates supported Friends and World scopes and future qualifying evidence for current metrics such as longest drive and most drives. Territory is a separate opt-in that uses future verified drives, removes endpoint areas, and publishes coarse monthly tiles under your leaderboard alias. Leaving removes participation and owned tiles. Invite-only Clubs show member usernames and display names to other members; optional Club Garage sharing exposes all of your active public build cards to that club until you turn it off or leave.

Saving a vehicle with Public visibility can create or update a revocable public card at an opaque link. The current public card can include your display name or username, unit preference, selected vehicle year, make, model, trim, nickname, color, and verified aggregate drive count, distance, top speed, and 0–60 result. It currently excludes avatar and vehicle photos, modifications, raw routes, exact location, VIN, odometer, private notes, maintenance, and private Garage history.

New or changed usernames, display names, profile photos, public vehicle details, and club names or descriptions are held for review before other members or public-card visitors see them. While review is pending, Trace can show a neutral identity or the last approved version. Your original content remains available to you and authorized reviewers. We retain the submitted version, approval or removal decision, and related safety records to operate these controls; operational email alerts contain aggregate queue counts, not the reported content.

Share cards, exported files, route previews, and public-card links can be copied or screenshotted. Revoking access stops future access through Trace where technically available, but it cannot retrieve a copy already held outside Trace.

Night route film. With Trace Pro you can export a drive as a short video of its route drawing itself. Trace renders the video on your iPhone from the drive's route, after the same privacy trimming as other route shares: the start and end areas (250 meters by default) and your privacy zones are removed. The video contains no location metadata from the original drive. Trace does not upload it; it goes only where you send it, to your Photos library (with add-only access) or through the iOS share sheet. Trace's working copy is kept outside your iCloud backup and removed within 24 hours. A recipient or platform you share it with handles it under its own practices.

We may disclose information when required by valid law, to protect people or the service, in a corporate transaction with appropriate safeguards, or with your direction or consent.

Deletion from active systems and expiration from backups may occur at different times. We use retention criteria that consider the feature requested, account status, user choice, security and fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and legal or accounting obligations.

• change profile and aggregate Stats visibility;
• turn on Ghost mode to keep drives you record out of what friends and other drivers can see, without stopping recording;
• turn live drive sharing with friends on or off in Settings › Privacy & Data, and choose each club separately on the club's screen or in Settings › Privacy & Data › Live drives in clubs;
• hide other people's live drives from your own map in Map Layers › Friends › Live drives;
• keep detailed drives and raw routes private, while recognizing that eligible completed-drive activity facts can appear to accepted friends when profile and Stats visibility allow;
• leave heatmap contribution, contact discovery, product analytics, and optional Mapbox telemetry off; use their separate controls to disable them later, including “Turn off contact discovery” in the Friends contact-discovery panel;
• manage automatic recording and iOS Location, Motion & Fitness, Contacts, Photos, and notification permissions;
• join or leave eligible leaderboards and clubs, revoke a public vehicle card, stop an eligible route share, and block or report accounts;
• request an account export of eligible hosted records and separately preserve local-only records;
• restore a drive or vehicle you deleted in the last 30 days from Recently Deleted, which puts it back on your iPhone and in your Trace account; and
• start account deletion in the app, as described in section 12, or contact support if the control or a processing step is unavailable.

Several U.S. states give residents rights over their personal information. Trace offers these choices to every U.S. user, whether or not a particular state's law applies to Vex:

• Know and access. Ask what personal information we hold about you and receive a copy.
• Correct. Fix inaccurate information in the app where you can edit it, or ask us to correct it.
• Delete. Delete your account and associated information as described in section 12.
• Portability. Export eligible account data in a portable format from Profile → Account → Export Account Data.
• Opt out. Trace does not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, use it for targeted advertising, or use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects, so there is nothing to opt out of today. If that changes, we will ask first or offer an opt-out as the law requires.

Sensitive information. Precise location is sensitive information under several state laws. Trace processes it only after you grant location permission, and only to provide the features you use, such as recording, maps, directions, and live drives you turn on. It is not sold, used for advertising, or used to infer other sensitive characteristics. You can withdraw location permission in iOS Settings, which stops the features that need it.

How to make a request. Use the in-app controls where they exist, or email support@builtbyvex.com with the subject “Privacy request.” We verify requests by asking you to confirm control of your Trace account or email address, and we will not ask for more information than we need. An authorized agent may submit a request with your written permission; we may still ask you to confirm your identity directly. We respond within 45 days and may extend that once by up to 45 more days where the law allows, telling you why.

Appeals. If we decline a request, reply to our decision with the subject “Privacy appeal,” and we will respond within 60 days. If you disagree with the outcome, you may contact your state attorney general.

No discrimination. We will not deny service, charge a different price, or provide a different quality of service because you exercised a privacy right. Trace does not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes.

Current status. Trace includes an account-deletion flow, and the connected cleanup process is designed to remove account data across active Trace systems and applicable providers. Those connected services are still being activated and tested. A submitted or pending request is not proof of deletion: until successful end-to-end completion is verified, a queued, pending, signed-out, or locally cleared state is not proof that hosted data or provider records have been erased. Rely only on the status shown in Trace or a completion confirmation from support. No completion period is published yet; we will publish one after end-to-end activation and testing are complete.

Before you begin. While safely parked, open Profile → Account → Export Account Data and verify the downloaded archive when the export feature is available. The server archive covers enumerated server-held records; it may not contain an active checkpoint, pending media, or another local-only item on this iPhone. Finish, discard, save, or separately preserve local-only work before deletion or uninstalling. Deletion is intended to be irreversible after completion.

Start in Trace.

1. Open Trace and sign in to the account you want to delete.
2. Open Profile, then Account, then Delete Account.
3. Select Begin Account Deletion.
4. When asked, confirm it is you by signing in again with the same method you use for Trace: Apple, Google, or your email and password.
5. Read the scope and Apple subscription reminder, then confirm only when ready.

The in-app path is the primary method because it binds the request to the verified account. If you cannot sign in or the control does not work, email support@builtbyvex.com with the subject “Trace account deletion help,” the app version, your sign-in method, and the step that failed. We must verify account ownership before acting on an email request, and an email alone is not proof that deletion occurred. Do not send a password, one-time code, authentication token, full Apple receipt, or raw route.

What completion covers. The completed workflow is designed to remove or de-identify the Trace authentication user, profile, visibility and privacy settings, contact-discovery state and hashes, social relationships, clubs and Territory records, blocks, reports where deletion is lawful, drives and route records, live drive share records, Garage and vehicle data, hosted media, public vehicle cards, heatmap submissions, feature state, provider tokens, and eligible analytics identity associated with the account. Local cleanup removes the account namespace, Recently Deleted copies, and app-held session or feature state on the participating device. Apple-controlled backups, Keychain behavior, another device, and copies outside Trace can follow separate lifecycles.

What may remain. Vex may retain the minimum records reasonably needed to document and complete the request, prevent fraud and abuse, resolve disputes, protect security, comply with tax or accounting rules, respond to lawful process, and honor a legal hold. Deleted data can also remain temporarily in restricted backups until those backups age out under ordinary cycles. Public or friend copies, screenshots, exports, files sent through another app, social-network posts, and other material already held by another person are outside Trace and cannot be recalled.

Apple subscriptions. Deleting a Trace account does not cancel an Apple subscription or automatically create a refund. Manage or cancel Trace Pro separately through Apple Subscriptions; Apple handles cancellation and refund requests under its rules.

Pending, failed, and complete. A request may remain pending while active Trace records, private storage, authentication, analytics identity, or provider tokens are processed. A request is complete only after the authoritative workflow reports completion and Trace or support provides a completion confirmation. Contact support@builtbyvex.com for the status of a request, preferably from the address associated with your account.

Trace is not directed to children and does not offer a child or parental-consent account. New and existing members must explicitly confirm that they are 18 or older when accepting the updated agreements; we retain the confirmation and server timestamp, not a date of birth. You must be at least 18 years old to create or use a Trace account. If we learn that a person under 18 provided personal information, we may close the account and delete the information as required by law. A parent or guardian may contact support@builtbyvex.com.

Trace uses measures such as account-scoped local storage, Keychain session storage, encrypted network transport, row-level database rules, private storage authorization, server-side validation, reduced public projections, and purpose-limited provider access. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability or absolute security.

If you believe your account or Trace data is at risk, contact support@builtbyvex.com. Do not email passwords, one-time codes, authentication tokens, complete payment details, or raw route files unless support gives you a secure way to provide specifically requested information.

We update the date and policy version when this Policy changes. For a material change, Trace asks you to review and accept the new version in the app before you continue using account features, and we may also give notice on the website, by email, or through another appropriate channel. Where consent is required for a new purpose, we will request it separately rather than treating continued use as consent. Earlier versions are available on request.

Operator

Vex Technologies Inc.

Formation

New York, United States

Privacy, security, and rights requests

support@builtbyvex.com