Privacy policy

1. Data controller

NO LIMITS TECHNOLOGY LLC (Wyoming, USA), owner of VanLife, is the controller of the personal data you provide to us. You can contact us about any data protection matter at info@vanlifetribu.com, which is the same mailbox shown inside the app.

2. What data we process

• Account: email and, if you fill it in, your name. If you sign in with Google, Google gives us your name and the address of your profile photo, and we store them in your account. If you sign in with Apple, Apple gives us your email —which may be an Apple private relay address, if you choose to hide yours— and, the first time only, your name, and we store them in your account.
• VanLife+: if you buy it, we store when your subscription ends. Payment is taken by the store (App Store or Google Play) and we never see your card.
• App usage, pseudonymised: it is not anonymous. It is tied to your user identifier and, only if you accept analytics, to an installation identifier of our own. It covers product events (PostHog), crash reports (Sentry) and, if you turn notifications on, your device token. In addition, every time it opens, the app asks Expo whether there is a new version: that request carries a technical identifier of the installation and, if an update failed, which one.
• Your trip and what you do with your account: the places you save, the areas you follow, your arrivals and achievements, what you confirm about a place under «The community confirms», the reports you send (linked to your account, so we can review them), your tribe and what you ticked in onboarding and, if you tell us you are interested in VanLife+, which feature interests you.
• Vehicle and contact, optional: model, licence plate, dimensions —the height feeds the clearance warning— and a phone number. They are used to pre-fill the SOS email and to let a garage call you.
• Location: your live position is not stored continuously: on the map and in SOS it is used in the moment to show you what is nearby, and when you navigate it goes to Mapbox to calculate the route. That said, let's be clear about what we do keep: when you start a navigation, that trip's origin, destination and route are saved to your account (for «Your trips» and the kilometres travelled); your arrivals at places are logged for achievements (so they survive reinstalling the app) and, if you have analytics turned on, every time you mark an arrival it is also recorded as an event —which place and how far away you were, even when you were far away and it did not count—, as is the municipality you are in when you download an offline map; and if you upload a community photo, we store the coordinates where you took it as proof that you were there. What is stored in your account is deleted when you delete the account; analytics events follow PostHog's retention periods.
• Searches: when you search for a place, the text you type goes to Mapbox to find it on the map, together with your position if we have it, which is only used to pick between towns with the same name. We do not store it in your account, but if you have analytics turned on, it is recorded there as one more event.
• Photos you upload to a place's page. We review them before publishing them and, if we approve them, they appear on the page without your name. If you delete your account, the photo stays on the page for other travellers.

3. Your public profile and the community

The public profile is opt-in: it does not exist until you create it. If you do, other people can see the name you choose, your sharing code, your vehicle model if you turn that option on and —if you enable them— your tribes, your achievements and the places you have visited. Never your email, your licence plate, your phone number or your live location.

The profile opens from a link with your code, so anyone who has it can see it without an account. You can change the code or switch the profile off whenever you like from the app, and it stops being visible immediately. Following someone only adds them to your list: that person gets no notification and does not know you follow them. If someone blocks you, you stop seeing each other; if you are reported, your profile is withdrawn while we review it.

4. Shared expenses

In an expense group, the other participants see the name you join with, the expenses you add —description, amount and date— and the split that comes out of them. Nothing else from your account. Anyone with the group's link or code can see it without an account and join, so share it only with the people travelling with you. We do not move money: the group only keeps the tally, and you settle up between yourselves outside the app. If you delete your account, your expenses and the name you joined with stay in the group, so that the others' split still adds up. If you created the group, though, it is deleted in full, with everyone's expenses, when your account is permanently deleted.

5. Shared routes

Your routes are private until you tap «Share». The route then gets a code, and anyone with that code or its link can see, without an account, the route's name and its stops, in order. Nothing else from your account. You can «Stop sharing» or delete the route whenever you like: the code stops opening it immediately, and if you share it again it gets a new one. There are two things we cannot take back for you: a copy someone has already saved to their routes, which is theirs, and the Google Maps links in the message, which carry the stops inside them. If you ask to delete your account, your routes stop being shared at once and are deleted with it.

6. What for, and on what legal basis

• Performance of the contract for everything needed to provide the service: your account, your trips, your bookings and the recommendations of places and plans for your tribe.
• Consent for product analytics, notifications and the public profile. You can withdraw it whenever you like from your profile in the app, without affecting what was processed before. If you turn notifications on, we let you know when the legal status of a place you saved changes or a new place is verified in an area you follow; promotional messages and app news, only if you also accept «VanLife news and reminders».
• Legitimate interest for handling your enquiries, for the security of the service (content moderation and abuse prevention) and for diagnosing crashes. That is why crash reports are on by default; you can turn them off whenever you like from your profile in the app.
• Legal obligation for keeping bookings with tax relevance.

We do not sell your data. Nor do we use ad networks or ad-tracking: the only ads in the app are banners from local businesses, marked as «Sponsored», for the broad area you are looking at (North, Central, Portugal…), taken from the filter you pick or, if there is none, from your position or the place you searched. We count how often they are seen and tapped, and in that broad area. That count carries no identifier unless you have analytics turned on: then it is tied to yours, like every other event. The business only receives aggregate figures, never your data.

7. Who we share it with

Supabase (database and authentication), Zoho ZeptoMail (sending the sign-up, sign-in and password-change emails, for which it receives your email), PostHog (product analytics, pseudonymised, hosted in the EU), Sentry (crash reports), Mapbox (map, place search and route calculation), Expo (sending notifications and app updates), Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (delivery of push notifications on Android), RevenueCat (checking your VanLife+ subscription, if you buy it: it receives your user identifier and the store receipt, never your card), Google (sign-in, if you choose it) and Apple (Sign in with Apple, if you choose it, and delivery of push notifications on iPhone). Stripe (payments) will only come in when we enable integrated payment: today it is paused and receives none of your data. All of them act as data processors, under contract, and EU-US transfers are covered by the Data Privacy Framework or by standard contractual clauses.

Separately, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway, in the European Economic Area) receives the coordinates of the places and destinations whose weather you check, with no data from your account; and when you report an error on a place's page, the alert reaches the team via Telegram with the place, the reason and your comment, without your name or your account.

8. How long we keep it

Your account and your data, for as long as you keep it open. When you delete it, we anonymise your personal data immediately and delete the account permanently after 30 days; until then your email —and, if you signed in with Google or Apple, the name they gave us and, with Google, the photo— stays in the blocked account, which cannot be used to sign in or to open another account (details in deleting your account). Bookings are kept for 5 years, already anonymised, as a tax obligation. Crash reports and product events follow Sentry's and PostHog's retention periods.

9. Your rights

You can delete your account whenever you like from your profile in the app, and also from this website. You have the right of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction and portability, and to withdraw your consent at any time. To exercise them, write to us at info@vanlifetribu.com.

And if you think we are not handling it properly, you can lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority: the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD, www.aepd.es) in Spain or the CNPD (www.cnpd.pt) in Portugal.

10. Minors

The minimum age to use VanLife is 16. If we detect an account belonging to a minor without valid parental consent, we delete it.