Halfstop
Legal

Privacy

What stays on your device, what we hold if you make an account, and what we do not collect at all.

In effect from 8 September 2026. Last changed 4 October 2026 - see what changed.

The short version

Halfstop does not run analytics, does not use advertising or tracking cookies, and does not sell anything about you to anybody. Most of what you make in it — your pins, your folders, your photographs, your downloaded maps — is stored on your own device and never leaves it. If you make an account, your folders and pins are also kept on a server so they can reach your other devices. If you subscribe, Stripe or Google Play takes the payment, and we never see your card. The rest of this page is the detail.

Who we are

Halfstop is made by Halfstop, LLC, an Indiana limited liability company. If you have a question about anything here, or want your data deleted, write to support@halfstop.app.

What stays on your device

Unless you sign in, everything you create in Halfstop lives in your browser or in the app on your phone, and we never receive it:

  • Folders, waypoints and tracks you save or import.
  • Photographs attached to a pin. The image itself is stored on the device and is never uploaded, even when you have an account — only its identifier is synced, so a picture taken on your phone will not appear on your laptop.
  • Downloaded map regions. The map tiles are held on the device.
  • Settings — theme, units, coordinate format, which layers you had switched on.
  • Files you open. A GPX, KML, KMZ or GeoJSON file you drop onto the map is read in the browser. It is not uploaded anywhere.

Clearing your browser's data, or deleting the app, removes all of it. Export a folder as GPX first if you want to keep it.

What we hold, if you make an account

An account is optional. Halfstop works without one. If you make one, we hold:

  • Your email address, so you can sign in and so we can send you a sign-in link.
  • A display name, if you set one. If you sign in with Google, Google also gives us your name and the address of your profile picture; we keep them with the account, and use your own display name first.
  • Your folders and what is in them — the name and color of each folder, and for every pin its coordinates, name, notes, icon and color. Coordinates of places you have saved are location data about places you care about, so we treat them as personal to you.
  • Who you have shared a folder with — the email address you invited, and whether they can view or edit.
  • Folder links you send — when you send a folder as a link, a copy of its places (coordinates, names, notes, icons and colors, but not photographs) for thirty days. Anybody holding the link can open that copy, signed in or not; links are not listed or searchable anywhere. After thirty days the link stops opening, and the copy is deleted at our next clear-out of expired links. You can also send a folder as a file instead, which leaves nothing with us.
  • Your plan — whether you have Premium, where it came from (the free month, a subscription, or a grant from us), when it renews or ends, and, for a subscription, the payment provider's reference for it. Whether you have used your free month, so it is only taken once.
  • Messages you send us at support@halfstop.app, kept in our support inbox so we can answer them.
  • Your signed-in sessions — for each device you are signed in on, the time, the IP address and the browser or app it came from. The sign-in service keeps these to keep the account secure, and a session's record goes when you sign out of it.

That is all. We do not store your device's live position, a history of where you have been, or anything about how you use the app.

Accounts and folder storage run on Supabase, which hosts the database on our behalf. Rules on the database restrict every row to the account that created it - except a folder link's copy, which is opened by its link, as described above.

Signing in with Google

If you choose Continue with Google, Google confirms who you are and tells us your email address, your name and the address of your profile picture. We do not receive your Google password, your contacts, your mail or anything else in your Google account, and Google is not told what you do in Halfstop. If an account with the same email address already exists, Google becomes another way into that account rather than a second one.

Paying for Premium

We never see or store your card details. The payment is taken by whichever service you subscribe through, under its own privacy policy:

  • Stripe, when you subscribe on this website. Stripe collects your card details and a billing address, which it needs to work out sales tax or VAT. We receive your subscription's status, its renewal date and Stripe's reference for it, and we send Stripe your email address so the receipt reaches you.
  • Google Play, when you subscribe in the Android app. Google handles the payment and your Google account. We receive the subscription's status, its renewal date and Google's reference for the purchase. To connect the purchase to your Halfstop account, the app gives Google your account's random identifier — not your email address.

We use that information to switch Premium on and off, and for nothing else.

Where you are

If you press the locate button, your browser or phone asks your permission and then gives Halfstop your position. It is used to draw the blue dot and to center the map. It is not sent to us and it is not stored.

One thing worth understanding: to draw a map around you, the app has to ask a tile service for the squares of map covering that area. Those services therefore see roughly where the map is looking. That is how any online map works, and it is why the offline downloads exist — a region you have already downloaded is drawn from the device with no request at all.

Other services the app talks to

Halfstop draws on public mapping and forecast services. When the app requests something from one of them, that service necessarily receives the request — which includes the area of map being asked for and, as with any web request, your IP address. We do not send them anything about you beyond that, and none of them are told who you are.

  • Mapbox — searching for a place by name and naming the nearest town for a pin, on Premium; the label fonts on the topographic map, and the mapping library itself.
  • komoot (Photon) — searching for a place by name and naming the nearest town for a pin, on a free account. What you type into the search box, the rough centre of the map it is searching near, the coordinate of a pin you open, and the names of places in a Google Maps list you import go to komoot's Photon service, which answers from OpenStreetMap data. On Premium those go to Mapbox, and what you type into the search box goes to both.
  • Cloudflare — storage for the topographic map archive.
  • USGS, Esri, NOAA / the National Weather Service, the FAA, BLM, the US Forest Service and state agencies — the aerial imagery, topographic quads, public land boundaries, airspace and weather layers.
  • OpenStreetMap — the street basemap, served by community tile servers.
  • A Valhalla routing server — only when you ask a trip to draw its road route.
  • GitHub — hosts the website itself.
  • Supabase — accounts and folder sync, as above.
  • Resend — sends the email Halfstop sends you (confirmation and sign-in links, folder invitations, notice of a changed password) and receives mail sent to support@halfstop.app.
  • Google — signing in with Google, if you choose it, and Google Play billing in the Android app.
  • Stripe — subscriptions bought on this website.

Each has its own privacy policy, and we do not control what they do with the requests they receive.

Cookies and tracking

There are none. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party tracking scripts, no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to. If you sign in, a token is kept in your browser's own storage so you stay signed in; that is a functional necessity rather than tracking, and signing out removes it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see what we hold about you, correct it, have it deleted, or receive a copy in a portable form. We will honour any of those, for anybody, wherever they live — write to support@halfstop.app.

A portable copy is available without asking: export any folder as GPX or GeoJSON from inside the app, at any time, with or without an account.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.

Children

Halfstop is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has made an account, write to us and we will remove it.