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TRAIL FUEL

Privacy

No accounts, no database, no tracking. But 'no database' is not the same as 'nothing reaches our server', so here is exactly what does.

Last updated: 19 September 2026

TRAIL FUEL is operated from Ontario, Canada. This policy explains what happens to information you type into the planner, and it applies to this website only.

The short version

  • You do not need an account. If you make one, it holds your email address and what you choose to save, and you can delete it yourself.
  • Everything you type in the planner is processed in your own browser while you fill the form in.
  • When you generate a plan, your trip details are encoded into the results link. The plan itself is calculated and drawn in your browser, but that link is a web address, so it reaches our server when the page is requested — and it may appear in ordinary server logs.
  • We set no cookies, run no analytics and no advertising, and sell nothing to anyone.

What stays in your browser

  • The planner form. Your height, weight, age, fitness, route, gear weights and dietary restrictions are held in the page while you work through the three steps. Nothing is sent anywhere during that.
  • An unfinished plan. The form is saved to your own device’s local storage under trailfuel.draft.v1 so a refresh does not lose your progress. It never leaves your device, and you can delete it yourself on the cookies and storage page.
  • A GPX file you import. The file is read and parsed in your browser and is never uploaded. A GPS track is a precise record of where a person walks, and nothing about answering “how far, how much climbing” requires us to hold that. It is also not saved to your device by us — re-import it if you refresh.

What reaches our server

Three things without an account, one more with, and we would rather spell them out than let you assume otherwise.

  • Your trip, inside the results link. A plan is encoded into the address of the results page — that is what makes a plan shareable and refreshable without an account. Because the page is rendered on the server, that address travels to us with the request. It contains the figures you entered, including age, height, weight and any allergies you selected. We do not store it in a database, but it can appear in the standard request logs our host keeps.
  • Your IP address and basic request details. Any web server sees these. We use the IP address transiently, in memory, to rate-limit the trail search routes so that one script cannot exhaust the services we depend on. It is not written to a database or used to build a profile.
  • Trail search text. If you use the beta trail search, the words you type are sent to our server, which asks the mapping services below on your behalf.
  • Your account, if you make one. Signing in stores your email address, the time you signed in, and a session cookie (see the cookies and storage page). Anything you then choose to save — a profile, a trip — is stored against that account in a database hosted in Canada, readable only by you, and removed in full when you delete the account. Sign-in is by emailed link; we never hold a password.

Treat a plan link as public. Anyone you send it to, and anyone they forward it to, can open it and read that plan. If your trip or your health details are sensitive, do not post the link somewhere public. Plan pages are also excluded from search engines, in robots.txt and with a no-index instruction on the page itself.

Who else is involved

  • Cloudflare hosts the site and processes requests on our behalf, which includes holding the ordinary server logs described above.
  • Supabase hosts the account database and sends the sign-in emails, on servers in Montréal, Canada. It sees your email address and whatever you save; it acts only on our instructions.
  • Photon (Komoot) and Overpass answer the beta trail search against OpenStreetMap data. Your search text goes to them; your IP address does not, because the request is made by our server rather than by your browser.
  • Retailers we link to. Some product links earn us a commission. Nothing about you is passed to them, but once you follow a link you are on their site, under their privacy policy, and they will set their own cookies. Not following the link avoids this entirely.

Some of these are outside Canada, so information handled through them may be processed in another country and be accessible to that country’s authorities under its laws.

What we do not do

  • No passwords, ever. No account is required to use the planner.
  • No analytics, no advertising networks, no social media pixels.
  • No cookies beyond the one that keeps you signed in — see the cookies and storage page, which explains why there is nothing here to consent to.
  • No selling, renting or trading of personal information. There is no circumstance in which we would do this.

How long anything is kept

  • Your draft: on your device until you clear it, or until your browser does.
  • Rate-limit counters: minutes, in memory, and lost whenever the server restarts.
  • Server logs: kept by our host for a short retention period on their standard schedule, then deleted. We do not copy them anywhere else.
  • Your account: until you delete it, which you can do on your account page at any time. Deletion is immediate and removes everything saved under it.

Your choices

Most of what you would normally have to ask us for is already in your hands: your draft is deletable from the cookies and storage page or by clearing your browser data, a plan stops existing the moment you stop sharing its link, and an account is deleted from its own page, by you, with no email to us required.

Under Canadian privacy law you can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, and complain about how we handled it. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area you may also have rights to erasure, restriction, objection and portability. Write to ctm313@gmail.com and we will answer within 30 days. Without an account the honest answer will usually be that we hold nothing tied to you; with one, it is exactly what your account page shows.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or to your own data protection authority if you are outside Canada.

Children

This is a planning tool for adults. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. A young person’s trip should be planned by the adult responsible for it — the calorie model is built on adult physiology and should not be applied to a child.

When this changes

Accounts, saved profiles and a paid tier are planned. Each of those stores real personal information, so this page will be rewritten before any of them ships, not after, and the date at the top will change. Material changes will be flagged on the site rather than made quietly.

Contact

Privacy questions, corrections and complaints: ctm313@gmail.com, or through the contact page.