Privacy Policy

Effective October 15, 2026

The short version: Rittiers has no account and no sign-up. Your routes live on your devices and in your own iCloud. There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking anywhere in the app. One part does leave your device: analysing a route, generating one or changing one sends that route to our own server, because that is where the road data lives. Nothing about it is tied to you.

Who is responsible

Rittiers is made by Thom Ritterfeld. Contact details are in the imprint; for privacy questions write to thom@ritterfeld.com.

Your routes

The routes you import, the folders you make, your settings and the rides you record are stored on your device. If iCloud is enabled, Apple syncs them through your private iCloud database (CloudKit) so they're available on your other devices, including your Apple Watch. Every route is also mirrored as a plain GPX file in your own iCloud Drive, under Rittiers, so your data is never locked inside the app. This sits in your iCloud account under Apple's privacy policy; we have no access to it.

Location while you ride

Tracking a route, recording a Free Ride and working out your arrival time all happen on your device. Your live position is not sent to us, and there is no live-tracking or sharing feature that would publish where you are.

The Rittiers server

Three features need road data that cannot fit on a phone, so they talk to a server we run at rittiers.ritterfeld.com:

• Analysing a route. When a route is matched against the real road network — which is what produces its climbs, surfaces, cobbled sectors and turn instructions — the route's GPX is sent to the server.
• Generating a route. Your description of the ride, your starting point and your chosen activity type are sent so a route can be built.
• Changing the ride ahead. The part of the route still in front of you and your current position are sent so it can be rerouted.

These requests carry no name, no account, no device identifier and no advertising ID — there is nothing in them that identifies you, because the app has no identity for you in the first place. Analysed results are cached on the server, keyed by a checksum of the route itself, so the same route doesn't have to be recomputed; that cache therefore holds route geometry. Ordinary web server logs record the IP address a request came from, as every web server does.

If you never analyse, generate or edit a route, nothing leaves your device at all. The route data the app already holds is yours and is not uploaded in the background.

Other services

To build and rate routes, the server draws on map data from OpenStreetMap through routing and points-of-interest services we host ourselves, and asks Open-Meteo for the wind and rain forecast along a route when you let it optimise for weather. Open-Meteo receives coordinates and a time, nothing else. When you name a place to ride to, the app looks it up with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim search. The map itself, and the name of your town, come from Apple Maps.

Apple Health

Rittiers can import past workouts so you can turn a ride you've already done into a route. That access is read-only, used only when you ask for an import, and the data stays on your device. It is never used for marketing or profiling, and we never receive it.

Analytics

The app contains no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind. Apple may share anonymous crash reports and usage statistics with us if you have opted in to that in your system settings; that data is aggregated by Apple and doesn't identify you.

This website

rittiers.ritterfeld.com uses no cookies, analytics or third-party embeds. Like any web server, ours processes your IP address and the pages you request in order to deliver them; these technical logs are not used to identify you.

Deleting your data

Deleting a route in the app removes it from your devices, from your iCloud and from the GPX mirror in iCloud Drive. Deleting the app removes its data from that device only. To remove it from iCloud as well, either delete your routes in the app first, or go to Settings › [your name] › iCloud › Manage Storage, choose Rittiers and delete its data. To have a cached analysis removed from the server, write to thom@ritterfeld.com.

Children

Rittiers doesn't knowingly collect personal data from anyone, including children.

Your rights

Because we hold no personal data that identifies you, there is nothing for us to export or delete on request. If you are in the EU you still have the rights under the GDPR, including to contact us or to complain to a data protection authority.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.