Privacy policy

Last updated 23 July 2026

TransitTempo is built so that the things people most want kept private — where they live, where they are right now — stay on their phone. This page describes exactly what is collected, what deliberately isn't, and how to remove all of it.

Who runs this

TransitTempo is an independent app operated by an individual developer in New York. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or any transit agency.

For any privacy question, or to ask for your data to be deleted, write to [email protected].

What stays on your device

The following never leaves your phone. It is held in the device's encrypted secure storage, and the app has no code path that transmits it:

• The street addresses of the places you save — home, school, work, anywhere else
• The coordinates of those addresses
• Your live location while you are moving
• The bundled index of transit stops the app matches against

Because it stays on the device, it also cannot be recovered by us. If you lose the phone and the recovery code, that information is gone and has to be entered again.

What we collect

Account

On first launch the app generates a random account identifier and a device credential. There is no sign-up: no email address, no password, no phone number, no name, no social login. You are given a recovery code so you can move your setup to another device. We cannot link an account to a person.

Your commute setup

• The nicknames you give your places (for example home, school) — the words only, never the addresses behind them
• The routes you build or select, expressed as public route numbers and public stop numbers such as 235N
• Your schedule: the days and times you need to arrive, and how early you like to be
• Your preferences: how much you dislike transfers, how much buffer you want, how you rank your routes

Notifications

If you allow notifications, Apple issues device tokens that we store so the server can send your leave-time alerts and the live countdown on your lock screen. These tokens identify a device for push delivery only. Deny notifications and none are stored.

Location, when you use Go Home

Go Home works in two ways. Normally your phone matches your position to nearby stops itself and sends only those public stop numbers — no coordinates reach us at all.

If you are somewhere you have not set up a route, the app can send your current position and your home coordinate so the routing engine can find a way back. When it does, those coordinates are used only to answer that one request, are erased from the record as soon as the routes are returned, and the record itself is deleted within the hour. They are never written to a profile or kept as a history.

Trip history — off unless you turn it on

You can opt in to keeping your completed trips, which unlocks your personal statistics and, anonymised, contributes to the public reliability figures we publish. This is off by default. While it is off, an overnight process clears the timings of any trips you took, so no travel pattern accumulates. Turning it off later stops future collection and clears what was held.

Technical logs

Our servers keep short-lived operational logs (for example, that a request happened and whether it succeeded) to diagnose faults. These are not used to build a profile of you and are not shared.

What we deliberately do not collect

• Your name, email address or phone number
• Your street addresses or their coordinates
• A history of where you have been
• Contacts, photos, calendar, or anything else on your phone
• Advertising identifiers

There are no third-party advertising SDKs and no analytics trackers in the app.

Transit data

Arrival predictions and schedules come from public feeds published by transit agencies. The app compares those published predictions with when vehicles actually arrive, and stores that difference by stop, route and time of day. That measurement describes the transit system, not any rider — it contains no personal information and is the same for every user.

How long things are kept

• Raw agency predictions: about two days, then deleted automatically
• Observed arrival times (system-wide, not personal): retained to keep the corrections accurate
• Go Home requests: location fields erased when the request is answered; the record deleted within the hour
• Your trips: only if you opted in to history; otherwise cleared nightly
• Your setup: kept until you delete your account

Sharing

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers. Data is shared only with the infrastructure providers needed to run the service — Apple, for delivering push notifications to your device, and our hosting provider — and only for that purpose. We may disclose information if legally compelled, though in practice there is very little to disclose.

Deleting everything

Settings → Privacy → Delete account removes your account and everything associated with it from our servers. It is immediate and cannot be undone. Removing the app from your phone also removes the addresses held in secure storage. You can also write to [email protected] and ask.

Children

TransitTempo is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or delete your personal information. Because accounts are anonymous, the practical route to all of these is the in-app delete, or writing to us. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top will change and the app will tell you before the change takes effect.