Privacy & data

Accounts are optional

You can plan without signing up. When optional account saving is available, Clerk handles sign-in and holds the email or Google profile you choose to use. PawStops stores an internal account identifier and the Clerk user identifier to associate trips you explicitly save. Signing in is not marketing consent, and we do not add you to Travel-Ball.com or Natural Waterscapes mailing lists.

What we store when you plan a trip

When you plan a trip we save your start, destination, dates, preferences, and itinerary. New trips require an ownership key held by the browser that created them for viewing, changes, and deletion. Older trips remain viewable by link until their owner chooses Make trip private; that blocks future link access but cannot recall downloaded copies. Saving a trip to an account retires its guest ownership key and removes this browser's offline copy. Account trips require a connection. For trips kept on this device, an optional offline save stores the itinerary here. It is not encrypted storage, and copies on a disconnected device cannot be remotely erased.

Your location

The live features — “Near me”, Driving Mode, “wrap up in X hours”, and replanning from where you are — use your device's GPS. Your position stays in your browser for map display unless you take an action that needs the server: when you replan or ask for wrap-up hotels, your coordinates are sent to our server to compute the new route, and a replan is saved to that trip's revision history. We never track your location in the background — it's only read while a live feature is turned on.

Services we rely on

To build a trip we send the places, coordinates, and route you're working with to third-party services, each under its own privacy policy:

  • Geocoding, routing, points of interest and map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors, via OSRM, Nominatim and Overpass.
  • Hotel names, ratings and pet-friendly signals from Google Places.
  • Weather forecasts from the U.S. National Weather Service.
  • Hotel booking links go to Expedia.
  • Optional sign-in uses Clerk and the identity provider you choose. Trip locations and itineraries are not sent to Clerk.

Affiliate links

Our hotel “Book” and “Browse” links are affiliate links. If you book after following one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes which hotels we show you or how they're ranked — ranking uses only your own brand, star and rating preferences.

Deleting a trip

On the home screen, your recent trips (saved only on this device) each have a trash button. Deleting removes the trip and its history from our database. If you clear this browser's storage you lose the ownership keys and access to private trips. A trip URL cannot recover them. For trips saved to an account, sign in and use My trips to open or delete them. Deleting your Clerk account sends PawStops a signed deletion notification; when received, we remove its saved trips and revisions. A minimal account identifier tombstone remains to prevent delayed requests from restoring a deleted account. After this privacy update, reconnect and save your itinerary offline again; older offline copies are removed when the updated app activates.

Usage analytics

To understand what's useful, we record selected events such as creating a plan, viewing a trip, and opening a hotel booking link. A random id stored in this browser can connect these events across visits, and an event may include a trip id that links to route information. This is pseudonymous data, not fully anonymous data. We allow only specific event fields such as counts, settings, and predefined categories; analytics does not accept free-text hotel names, addresses, travel dates, edit keys, or email addresses. We do not use an external analytics service or build an advertising profile from these events.

There is currently no scheduled automatic deletion of usage events. Clearing browser storage removes this browser's random id and trip edit keys, but does not erase events already recorded. Deleting a trip does not promise deletion of associated usage events. Contact us with questions about stored data.

Protecting the service

Our hosting service processes IP addresses to deliver requests and help protect the service. Paw Stops also uses an IP-derived identifier for request limits. This is separate from usage-event properties and can still distinguish requests from the same network. Hosting and upstream services may process connection information under their own policies. These operational identifiers should not be understood as anonymous merely because an address is transformed.

Contact

Questions about your data? Email [email protected].