This policy explains what personal information DriftKin collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. We’ve tried to write it in plain language. If something is unclear, ask us at support@driftkin.app.
Who we are
DriftKin is run by Rahul Ankola, an individual (sole proprietor) based in Pennsylvania, United States. It is not a company. In this policy, “DriftKin”, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Rahul Ankola, operating as DriftKin.
This policy covers the website at driftkin.app and the DriftKin apps for iOS and Android (together, the “Service”). DriftKin is offered only in the United States and is intended for people there. You can reach us about anything in this policy at support@driftkin.app.
The short version
- We collect what we need to run the Service, and we tell you below exactly what that is.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
- There are no ads, ad trackers, advertising IDs or third-party analytics tools in the website or the apps. We keep a few counts of our own, such as how many people open the app each day and which upgrade prompts they see, to run and improve DriftKin (section 3).
- The website uses no tracking cookies. See the Cookie Policy.
- Some features only work by sending data to other companies: maps go to Google Maps Platform, Drifty goes to Google’s Gemini API, and weather goes to the U.S. National Weather Service. They are listed in section 6.
- You can delete your account and its data at any time, in the app or at driftkin.app/delete-account.
What we collect
On this website
When you open a published suggested trip on driftkin.app, the page adds one to an anonymous daily view counter for that trip, at most once per browser session. The counter stores nothing about you, and the browser notes that it counted the visit using session storage that disappears when you close the tab (see the Cookie Policy).
When you use a form on this website
- Waitlist: your email address.
- Beta request: your full name, a contact email, the email address of your Apple ID and your country of residence. Apple’s TestFlight service uses your name and Apple ID email to send you the beta invitation; we use the contact email to reach you and the country to understand where testers are.
- Contact form: your name, email address, the topic, subject and message you write, and any file you choose to attach.
- Reviews: your star rating and, if you write one, your note. If you happen to be signed in to DriftKin in the same browser, the review is linked to your account ID. We don’t ask for your name.
When you create and use an account in the app
- Account details: email address, password and an optional username. Passwords are stored in hashed form by our database provider, and we cannot read them. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive the name and email address that provider shares with us, which may be a private relay address.
- Your agreement to our policies: which version of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy you accepted, when, and whether it was at sign-up or after an update.
- Trips you create: origins, destinations, stops, dates, times, notes, checklists and the list of people on a shared trip.
- Files you attach: photos and documents you add to a trip (for example tickets or confirmations) and images you add to support tickets. We only access your camera or photo library when you choose to attach something.
- Activity in the app: stamps, visited parks and badges you earn, and your settings (theme, distance units, preferred maps app).
- Product usage: the days you opened the app (one record per day, with no time, location or device details), and each time an upgrade prompt is shown to you, which one it was, whether you continued to the plans page or dismissed it, and your device platform. If you later start a trial or subscribe, we record which prompt, if any, led you there. We use this only to count active users and to see which limits and prompts help people and which don’t. It is linked to your account. We don’t share it with anyone else or use it for advertising.
- Support tickets: the messages you send us through in-app support and our replies.
- Membership: whether your account is Free or Pro, when a trial or plan started and ends, how it was granted (for example a trial or promo code), and when it moved from Pro to Free. When an account moves to Free, we use that date to decide which trips become view-only and to allow one new trip.
Location
If you allow it, the app uses your device’s precise location while you are using the app to set your starting point and show nearby stops. We do not collect your location in the background, and we do not keep a history of where you have been. Your current location is not stored on our servers unless you save it as part of a trip, for example as a starting point. You can turn location access off at any time in your device settings, and you can still type in addresses by hand.
Drifty, the AI assistant
When you use Drifty, the messages you send and the trip details Drifty can see (such as stop names, addresses, dates and notes) are sent to Google’s Gemini API to generate a reply. We do not store the text of your Drifty conversations on our servers. To enforce Drifty’s hourly usage limit, we briefly record your account ID, the time of each request and which part of the app it came from. It contains no message text, and records older than an hour are deleted automatically. Section 4 explains where to read how Google handles this data.
Payments
If you subscribe to DriftKin Pro, the sale is made by Stripe as merchant of record, on a secure page that opens from the app. Stripe collects your card or wallet details, billing address and any information it needs to calculate tax and prevent fraud directly, and may offer you a Link account. We don’t receive or store your full card number. We keep your Stripe customer ID, the plan you chose, the status of your subscription, and its trial, renewal and cancellation dates, so the app can show your membership and grant Pro. Stripe processes your data under its own privacy policy as well as ours. To offer the free trial once per person, we also keep a one-way hash of your email address, which stays after you delete your account (see section 8).
Collected automatically
Like any website, driftkin.app is delivered through servers that receive your IP address, browser and device type, the page you asked for, the referring page and the time. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes this to deliver pages and protect the site against attacks and abuse, and may collect network error reports from your browser for the same purpose. Our database provider, Supabase, keeps similar logs of requests made by the app. We do not use these logs to build profiles of you.
We do not use third-party analytics tools, advertising SDKs, advertising identifiers, session recording, fingerprinting or cross-site tracking in the website or the apps. The one exception to “nothing from other companies” is the Google Maps component of the iOS app, which collects some technical data for Google as described in section 6. We do not receive that data, and Google declares that it does not use it for tracking or advertising.
What we don’t collect
We don’t collect your contacts, microphone input, health data, background location, government ID numbers or payment card numbers. Please don’t put sensitive information (for example health, financial or identity details) in trip notes, Drifty messages or support messages.
How Google handles Drifty data
Drifty runs on Google’s Gemini API. The messages you send to Drifty and the trip details sent with them go to Google, and what Google does with that data is governed by Google’s own terms and privacy policy, not ours. We don’t control it, and we can’t make promises about it. Please read the Gemini API Additional Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.
Because of this, don’t send Drifty anything confidential or sensitive, and don’t use Drifty if you’re not comfortable with it. Everything else in DriftKin works without it. Drifty’s answers are generated by AI and can be wrong. See the Terms.
How we use it
We use personal information only to:
- create your account, save and sync your trips, let you share trips, and run Drifty, maps, routes, weather and park features;
- email you when DriftKin launches, if you joined the waitlist (you can withdraw this at any time);
- run the beta programme and send your TestFlight invite, if you signed up for it;
- reply to contact-form messages and support tickets;
- read reviews and feedback to fix problems and improve DriftKin;
- send service messages, such as sign-in emails, security notices and changes to these policies;
- count active users and understand which limits and upgrade prompts people meet, so we can fix and improve DriftKin;
- keep the Service secure, enforce usage limits, offer the free trial once per person, and prevent fraud and abuse; and
- comply with the law, respond to lawful requests, and establish or defend legal claims.
We don’t make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Drifty’s suggestions are only suggestions.
We may email you about launch news if you joined the waitlist or beta. Marketing emails include a way to unsubscribe, and you can also email support@driftkin.app at any time.
Where your data is processed
DriftKin is run from the United States and is offered only to people in the United States. Our providers store and process data mainly in the United States, and some may process it in other countries under their own safeguards. If you use DriftKin from outside the U.S. anyway, your information will be processed in the U.S., where data protection laws may differ from yours.
How long we keep it
We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes above. These are typical periods, not guarantees:
| Data | Typically kept for |
|---|---|
| Account, trips, attachments, stamps, preferences | Until you delete them or delete your account. |
| Record of which Terms and Privacy Policy versions you accepted | Until you delete your account. |
| Membership history (when your account moved between Free and Pro, how, and when it moved to Free) | Until you delete your account. |
| App activity records (the days you opened the app, and which upgrade prompts you were shown and what you did with them) | Until you delete your account. |
| Free-trial record (a one-way hash of your email address, and the date) | Kept after you delete your account, so that one person can't get the free trial again by deleting and re-creating an account. It cannot be turned back into your email address, and holds nothing else. |
| Support tickets and their attachments | For the life of your account, then deleted with it. |
| Waitlist email | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove it, and generally not long after DriftKin's public launch. |
| Beta tester name, contact email, Apple ID email and country | Until the beta programme ends or you leave it, plus a short wind-down period. |
| Contact-form messages | For a period after the conversation ends, so we can follow up on the same issue. |
| Subscription records (Stripe customer ID, plan, status, trial and renewal dates) | Until you delete your account. When you delete your account we cancel any active subscription and ask Stripe to delete the customer record. Stripe may keep payment records for as long as the law requires. |
| Reviews | Until you ask us to delete them. A review that was linked to your account is deleted when you delete your account. |
| Drifty usage records (account ID, time and app area of each request) | About an hour, only to enforce the hourly usage limit. Older records are deleted automatically. Conversation text is not stored on our servers. |
| Server and security logs | Kept by Cloudflare and Supabase for their standard log periods, typically days to weeks. |
| Backups | Deleted data can remain in encrypted backups for a limited time before it is overwritten. |
We may keep information longer when the law requires it, or to resolve a dispute or enforce our Terms, and only for as long as that reason lasts.
When you delete your account, trips you organised that other people have joined stay available to those people. You are removed from them, and ownership passes to another member.
Security
We use reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, such as encryption in transit and access controls on our database. No system is perfectly secure, and we can’t guarantee that information will never be accessed, disclosed or lost. Please use a strong password that you don’t use anywhere else.
If a security breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by applicable law, including Pennsylvania’s Breach of Personal Information Notification Act.
Your choices and rights
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy, in a portable format where practical;
- correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
- delete your information;
- stop using your information for a purpose you object to, or withdraw consent you gave (such as the waitlist).
To delete your account, use Profile → Delete account in the app, or driftkin.app/delete-account. For anything else, email support@driftkin.app from the address linked to your account or form submission. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
We will respond within the time the law requires. To protect your data, we may need to verify that the request comes from you, usually by confirming control of the email address involved. You may use an authorised agent where the law allows; we may ask the agent for proof of authority and ask you to confirm your identity. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights, as the law requires. If we deny a request, we will explain why where the law requires it, and you may appeal by replying to that decision.
California and other U.S. states
Several U.S. states give residents rights to know, access, correct and delete personal information, and to opt out of its sale, of sharing for targeted advertising, and of profiling. DriftKin doesn’t sell or share personal information, doesn’t use it for targeted advertising, and doesn’t profile you in ways that produce legal or similarly significant effects, so there is nothing to opt out of. We honour requests from all U.S. users whether or not a state law requires it. We don’t use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose that would give Californians a right to limit it. Under California’s “Shine the Light” law, we don’t disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing.
The categories of personal information we have collected in the past 12 months are identifiers (name, email, account ID, IP address), customer records, commercial information (your plan and subscription status), internet or network activity (server logs, the days you opened the app, and which upgrade prompts you saw), precise geolocation (only with your permission, as described above) and the content you create. Their sources, purposes and recipients are described in sections 3, 5 and 6.
Browser privacy signals
Because we don’t sell or share personal information or track you across other websites, Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals don’t change anything we do. We treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a valid opt-out request anyway.
Children
DriftKin is not directed at children, and you must be at least 13 to use it. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal information, email support@driftkin.app and we will delete it.
Other websites and apps
DriftKin links to, and can hand off to, services we don’t control, such as Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, park websites and businesses Drifty suggests. Their own privacy policies apply once you use them.
Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when what we collect or how we use it changes, and we will change the effective date above when we do. We may also tell you about a change, for example by email or in the app. Where the law requires your consent to a change, we will ask for it.
Contact
Questions, requests or complaints about privacy: support@driftkin.app. You can also use the contact form. DriftKin is operated by Rahul Ankola, Pennsylvania, United States.