Privacy zones: the circle around home
Every ride starts in the same place. Your driveway, your yard, the garage with the oil stain that was already there when you moved in.
That’s the part nobody mentions with tracking apps. Corners, altitude, lean — everyone likes talking about those. That every recording starts at a spot where you probably sleep isn’t in anybody’s ad copy.
A circle, and inside it nothing happens
In MotoNavigator you draw a circle around home. Inside it, nothing is recorded.
Not: recorded and deleted later. Not: uploaded and hidden. Never written in the first place — not even on your own phone. And not just the position: speed, course, altitude, lean, air pressure, every single reading stays empty.
The difference isn’t wordplay. What gets stored and deleted later was there for a while. What was never written was never there. Only in the second case is the question “and what if somebody gets at it?” already answered, in advance.
The thing about the gap
Here comes the part I got wrong myself the first time I explained it.
You’d think: fine, so a piece is missing at the start. A hole in the recording. Wrong — and for a good reason. The ride runs on, the clock runs with it, without a gap. Only the values are missing.
Because a hole would be ambiguous. A hole can be a tunnel. A phone that crashed. A GPS that can’t find sky. A battery that gave up in the middle of nowhere. Whoever reads the recording later doesn’t know what he’s looking at, and starts guessing.
So the row is there. It’s just empty — and it carries a marker that says why it’s empty. No riddle, no room for interpretation, nothing anybody can read something into.
What somebody sees if one of your rides ends up in their hands: not where it really ends. Otherwise only what was ridden. Distance, speed, lean. No name, no address, no destination.
Towards us as well
The point holds in our direction too. If you contribute recordings so the routing gets smarter, the circle around your house is just as empty in that file as it is on your phone.
We don’t know where inside the circle you live. We can’t know. And personally I prefer that to any promise not to look — promises last as long as the company that made them. A value nobody wrote lasts longer.
Draw the circle. Takes ten seconds. Then you ride off, and the first thing that exists of your tour is the road past the village sign.