Choo Crew — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 26 September 2026
Choo Crew is a live transit map and a territory game: you claim the bus, train car, ferry or aircraft you actually rode. Proving that you rode it is the only reason the app looks at your location or your phone's motion. This page says exactly what is collected, why, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it.
Who runs Choo Crew
Choo Crew is run by the developer of Choo Crew, an independent developer. There is no company, no advertising business and nothing for sale behind this app.
Signing in
You sign in with Sign in with Apple or with Google. The sign-in itself is handled by Supabase Auth, which holds your sign-in account — including the email address Apple or Google returns. If you use Apple's "Hide My Email", that address is Apple's private relay address, not your real one.
From the sign-in the app keeps a game profile: a public display name, a claim colour and a buddy face. The starting display name comes from the local part of your email address, or, on the first Apple sign-in only, from the given name Apple hands over once. When neither is usable you start as "Rider" plus four characters. Your email address is never copied into the game database — the server reads it once from your signed sign-in token to suggest that starting name.
Location
Choo Crew asks for location permission only when you first need it — nothing is asked at launch. The permission requested is "While Using the App". Choo Crew never asks for "Always".
The blue dot. When you tap the locate button, the app watches your precise location while it is open and on screen, to draw your dot and the accuracy ring on the map. Those fixes stay on the phone.
Ride sessions. When you tap a vehicle to claim it, the app opens a ride session and records your location about once a second for the length of the ride. Each fix is a timestamp, latitude, longitude, accuracy, speed and course. They are uploaded to the Choo Crew server in batches roughly every 15 seconds, where they are compared against the vehicle's own live track from the public transit feed. If the two match, the claim is verified; if they don't, the claim doesn't happen.
Backgrounding. A ride recording that started while the app was open keeps running with the app in your pocket, which is how a real ride can be measured. Recording stops when the ride session ends. Choo Crew does not track you when no ride is running.
Motion
During a ride session the app reads the accelerometer about 20 times a second to tell "stopped at a station" from "moving". Raw accelerometer readings never leave your phone. Only the resulting transitions — a timestamp plus the word stopped or moving — are uploaded, and only during a ride.
What other riders can see
Choo Crew is a multiplayer game, so part of your profile is public to anyone using the app:
- your display name, claim colour and buddy face;
- the vehicles you currently hold, and the territory-miles on each;
- names you christen a vehicle with;
- your rider profile page: lifetime miles, the cities and vehicle kinds you have ridden, your best-held vehicles and your rivalries;
- your position in the standings;
- claims and steals as they happen, in the live feed.
Your location traces, your ride sessions and your wallet balance are not public. Nobody can see where you are on the map.
What Choo Crew does not do
- No advertising, no advertising identifier (IDFA), no ad networks.
- No third-party analytics and no crash-reporting SDK — there are none in the app.
- No tracking across other companies' apps or websites, ever.
- No access to your contacts, photos, microphone or calendar.
- No "Always" location permission.
- Your data is never sold, rented or shared for anyone else's marketing.
Who processes data for Choo Crew
| Apple, Google | Sign in with Apple and Google Sign-In. They see that you signed in to Choo Crew. |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Authentication and the database, hosted in the United States. Holds the sign-in account and the game data. |
| Railway | Hosts the Choo Crew server. Like any web host it keeps ordinary server logs, which can include IP addresses. |
| CARTO | Serves the plain background map style and its tiles directly to your phone, so it sees your IP address and which map tiles you looked at. No account data is sent. |
The transit agencies and open data feeds Choo Crew reads — MBTA, LA Metro, MTA, CTA, Amtrak, ADS-B and AIS aggregators and the rest — are fetched by the Choo Crew server, never by your phone. They receive nothing about you.
How long things are kept
- Ride location traces: the raw fixes are deleted about seven days after the ride ends. A short record of the ride itself — the point you tapped, whether it verified, your device platform and app version — stays until you delete your account.
- Claims: a claim you don't refresh decays on its own after seven days, and is gone the moment somebody else takes the vehicle.
- Profile, wallet and game history: kept until you delete your account.
Deleting your account
In the app: Settings → Delete account. It deletes your sign-in account, every ride session and location trace, and your wallet and items. Your game profile is kept but anonymised — the name becomes "Departed rider" with no face and no link to you — so the standings and the history of who took what from whom stay coherent. Territory you still held decays away on its own within seven days. The deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.
Children
Choo Crew is not directed at children under 13, and it is not designed or marketed for them.
Your choices
You can turn location off for Choo Crew at any time in iOS Settings — the map, the arrivals and everybody else's territory keep working; you just can't verify a ride. You can delete your account at any time, as above. If you want a copy of what is held about you, or a correction, write to the address below.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the new version is published at this same address.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about the data Choo Crew holds about you: