Recording and data sovereignty

What gets written down, what doesn't — and who owns it. You.

A recording is the raw material of every story you tell afterwards — the archive, the memory, the proof. Two principles: it belongs to you, and it stays raw.

What gets recorded

• Where you are — as often as the phone hands it over (on an iPhone roughly once a second), unsmoothed, with nothing quietly nudged onto the road afterwards. Stand 2 m off the tarmac and the dot stands 2 m off the tarmac. Honest data, no makeup.
• How you move — acceleration, rotation, magnetic field. Raw, the way the sensors hand them over, not pre-chewed into a heading. 25 times a second, always. No winding the rate up and down with the mood of the road: the dull second is captured as finely as the one where it gets interesting.
• Air pressure — if the phone carries a barometer, about once a second. We work the altitude out of the raw pressure ourselves instead of taking the finished figure from the operating system.

Taking a break

You pause it yourself. Nothing decides on your behalf that the ride is over — a traffic jam is not a break, and a long coffee is not a ride.

A pause really does stop the recording: nothing more is written down, and the sensors that only run for the recording are switched off. No data from somebody else’s living room, none from the café stop. Knowing where you are carries on — the map under your thumb still has to work — it simply lands in no file. And it goes out to nobody either: on a group ride the others see you as paused, not as a dot wandering about.

The break itself is noted, start and end. That is what later lets you separate real riding time from standing-about time — the numbers don’t lie, even when the group does.

Passing it on

Three ways out, and they are for different jobs:

• On a group ride the host shares the route straight to everyone riding along. No file swapping, no detour.
• As .mnav — our open exchange format, and the better choice whenever the other end can read it. Your track goes out exactly as you rode it — point for point, never thinned out — and it keeps where it came from. GPX doesn’t delete that origin, it overwrites it: anything that has been through GPX once comes back as an imported track from a stranger, whatever it was before. And if you’re planning rather than riding, .mnav holds everything on top of that for which GPX has no field at all — folders, the same route sitting in several projects, the difference between riding through and stopping, waiting times, the routing profile. In GPX that is gone, and gone without a word.
• As GPX — for everything else. Every sat-nav and every route portal reads it, and for a plain record of where you went it is perfectly fine.

The way out of the app is your phone’s share sheet: forum, mail, AirDrop, your own cloud. There is deliberately no feed inside the app — what you share travels the channels you already trust.