On-mountain only.

What data we use

While using HotLaps, we may collect the following data:

• Location: If you enable location sharing, we may share your current location (according to your preferences) with other HotLaps users to help you find each other. More details below. Location is also used to show you relevant content including suggestions for nearby mountains.
• Contacts: If you choose to share your contacts, we'll use this to suggest HotLaps friend connections with people you already know.
• Email address: If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive the email address that provider gives us (including an Apple "Hide My Email" relay address if you choose one). We use it to identify your account, to reach you about your account, and — as a scrambled (hashed) value — to match you to a friend who has your address in their contacts.
• Date of birth: We ask for it once, when you set up your account, so we can check that you're at least 13. Details below.

Your date of birth

You must be at least 13 to use HotLaps, so we ask for your date of birth when you set up your account.

• What we collect: the date you enter, once. We don't ask for a document, a photo, or anything else to prove it.
• Why: to check you're old enough, and to keep that check working across a reinstall or a new phone.
• Who sees it: no other HotLaps user ever sees it — not on your profile, not in an event, not anywhere in the app. It's stored on your account record and it isn't part of what other people can look up. Our own staff can see it when handling a support request or an age-block appeal.
• We don't use it for anything else: no birthday messages, no ads, no age-based targeting, no sharing it with anyone outside HotLaps.
• If you're under 13: the account is blocked and can't use HotLaps. You can still sign out or delete the account from the block screen, and you can write to support@hotlaps.app if the date was entered wrong.
• And we erase what we already had: blocking the account immediately deletes the details we'd received before you reached this screen — the email address from Apple or Google (every copy of it we hold), your name, your HotLaps username, your profile photo, anything you'd written about yourself, any contacts you'd imported, and the registration that lets us send notifications to your phone. We keep the date you entered, the fact that the account is blocked, and the link to the Apple or Google account you signed in with — the date is what lets support fix a typo, and the link is both what stops the same account quietly signing in again and what lets you sign back in to delete it. If the account had already been used, the things it produced — messages you sent, statuses, events, friendships and our server logs — stay until the account is deleted; blocking clears the personal details above, not the account's history. Deleting the account removes all of it.
• Deletion: it's deleted with the rest of your account when you delete your account.

What we don't do

• We never sell your data, and we don't rent, trade, or monetize it.
• No advertising trackers, no ad networks, no ad profiles, and no data brokers.
• We use exactly one third-party analytics provider — Google Analytics, on the hotlaps.app website only. It is named and described under "Website analytics" below, and it is the only outside company that receives anything about your use of HotLaps that we chose to send.
• No retention of off-mountain location, ever.

Website analytics

This section is about the hotlaps.app website. The iOS and Android apps contain no analytics SDK at all.

• What it is: we use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read, so we know whether the site is doing its job.
• Approximate location: Google Analytics derives an approximate location — roughly country, region and city — from your IP address. That is the one place a third party learns anything about where you are, and it has nothing to do with the on-mountain location sharing described above: your GPS position, your mountain region, and the lift you're at are never sent to Google or to anyone else outside HotLaps.
• You choose: the first time you visit, a banner asks. Until you accept, the tag is loaded in a consent-denied state — it sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. Your choice is remembered in your browser's local storage, and you can change it by clearing your site data for hotlaps.app.
• We don't send identifiers in the URL: a page address that contains a person's handle, an event, group or resort id is normalised before it is reported — /app/meetups/:id, never the real id — and an invite link (/i/…) is never reported in any form.
• Not the whole site: the operator console at /admin/ is excluded entirely — no analytics run there.
• No advertising: we don't enable Google's advertising features, we don't build audiences, and we don't share the data with ad networks.

How location data is used

• On the mountain: the granularity you’ve picked (full GPS, mountain region, or current lift) is visible to other HotLaps users on the same mountain.
• Off the mountain: nothing. Your last on-mountain ping ages out within 10 minutes and you disappear from nearby maps. No background tracking, no “heading home” status, no last-seen timestamp persists.
• Always: your handle, display name, and events you host or RSVP to are visible to other users on the same mountain while an event is active.

Limitations to location tracking

We automatically restrict location tracking to only track within the boundaries of ski mountains and resorts. No matter if you leave location sharing on, your location is never tracked or stored by us when you're not on the mountain.

You control the granularity

Three settings, your choice, change anytime:

• Full — exact GPS pin on the mountain map.
• Region — coarse area like “north peak”. Default.
• Lift — just the chairlift you’re at.

Whichever you pick, the fields you didn’t opt to share are never written to our database — not blanked on read, not stored encrypted, just not written.

Data we do keep

Account info (handle, display name, email address, profile photo, hashed password if you set one, date of birth), the events you create or RSVP to, and the most-recent on-mountain presence ping (overwritten on every heartbeat, expires after 10 minutes of inactivity).

Account deletion

You can choose to delete your account at any time. From the iOS app: Settings → Delete account. Your personal data — email address, name, profile photo, date of birth, location, imported contacts — is erased as soon as you confirm, and in every case within 24 hours.

One thing stays behind, deliberately: messages you already sent to other people remain in their conversations, with you shown as [deleted]. We don't delete other people's copies of their own chat history.