What we know about you, and why.

“Freedom Rides”, “we” and “us” mean the car service operating at freedomridesapp.com. We are the people who run it — the small group who take the bookings, drive the cars and answer the messages — and not a platform standing between you and someone else.

Privacy questions go through our contact form. That includes asking what we hold about you, asking us to correct it, and asking us to delete it. We publish that route because it is the one we watch: a note left there lands in front of a person who can act on it, rather than in an inbox nobody opens.

• Your mobile number. Required. It is how we verify it is really you, how a driver reaches you, and where ride updates go. See our SMS Policy.
• Pickup and drop-off addresses — and any note you add to the ride, which is passed to the driver as you wrote it.
• Your name and email, if you give them. Neither is needed to book. They appear on receipts and let us email you instead of texting you.
• A recurring schedule, if you set one up — the trip and the days it repeats.
• What you write to us — the name, email, subject and message from the contact form, and the reason you give when you ask for a refund.
• Driver details, if you drive with us — driver's license number, an emergency contact, and the make, model, color, year and plate of the car you drive.

• The ride itself — requested, assigned, accepted, en route, arrived, completed or canceled, each with a timestamp, plus who canceled it and why.
• Map coordinates for your addresses — worked out from the address text so dispatch can see the trip on a map and check it is inside the service area.
• The fare and how it was calculated — amount, the itemized breakdown, the pricing rule in force when the ride completed, any tip, and the payment's status.
• A record of what staff did — when dispatch or an administrator changes a ride, an account or a price, we log who did it and when, so a dispute has a paper trail.
• A browser notification subscription — only if you turn on notifications, and only the token your browser issues for the purpose.

What we do not collect is worth saying too: no advertising or analytics trackers, no third-party cookies, no device fingerprinting. If you are a passenger, we never follow your phone's position — not while you are booking, not while you are riding, and not in the background. The passenger app asks for no location permission at all; the only places it knows about are the addresses you type. Sign-in uses cookies for one thing — keeping you signed in.

Our driversare a different case, and it has its own section below, because during a trip a driver's phone does report where the car is.

When a driver marks a trip on my way, their phone starts sending us the vehicle's position so you can watch it approach. This is the one place Freedom Rides collects a live location, and these are its exact edges.

• Whose phone: the driver's, never the passenger's. You are shown where the car is. Nothing on your phone is asked where you are.
• What is collected — the vehicle's latitude and longitude, how accurate that reading is, which way it is pointing and how fast it is moving. Nothing else. Not the driver's contacts, not their other apps, not their phone's identifiers.
• When it starts— at the moment the driver marks your trip “on my way”. Not when they start their shift, not when they open the app, and not because the app is installed.
• When it stops — the moment the trip is completed or canceled. Between trips a driver is not tracked, and a driver who is available for work but has no trip under way is not tracked either.
• How long we keep it: we don't. There is one position per driver and each new reading overwrites the last, so there is never more than the current one. When the trip ends it is deleted. We keep no route, no trail and no history of where a car has been — not for a day, not for an hour. It cannot be replayed later, by us or by anyone asking us for it, because it no longer exists.
• Who can see it — the passenger on that trip, while that trip is running, and the people running Freedom Rides who dispatch it. Not other passengers, not passengers on other trips with the same driver, and not any other car service. When the trip ends the map stops working for everyone.

Two things we are not doing with it, so that nobody assumes otherwise. We do not use it to check up on drivers between jobs — there is no data to check, which is the point of keeping none. And a moving car on a map is not an estimate: we do not promise an arrival time, because a wrong one on a dialysis appointment is worse than none.

If you drive with us, your phone will ask you to allow location “always”, will ask again after a few days, and will tell you from time to time that the app has been using your location in the background. That is your phone doing its job, not a fault in ours. The permission can be withdrawn in your phone's settings at any time; the trip screen and everything else keep working, and the passenger simply does not see the car move.

• To send a driver to the right place at the right time.
• To confirm your phone number and keep someone else from booking as you.
• To text or email you about a ride you asked for — nothing else.
• To price the ride, take payment, and give you a receipt.
• To sort out refunds, complaints and anything that goes wrong on a trip.
• To keep the books, and to answer a lawful request from an authority if one arrives.

Only the people and services that have to. Each one gets the least it needs to do its job.

• Your driver — your name if you gave one, your number, the pickup, the drop-off and your note. Not your payment details, and not your ride history.
• Dispatch — the people running Freedom Ridescan see the rides and accounts of this service in order to run it, and, while a trip is under way, where that trip's car is.
• Supabase — hosts the database and runs sign-in, so it holds your account and your rides.
• Twilio — delivers the text messages, so it receives your number and the message text.
• Resend — delivers email, so it receives your email address and the message.
• Stripe — takes card payments. Your card is entered on Stripe's own payment page and we never see or store the number; we keep Stripe's reference to you and to the payment. Your name, email and phone are passed to Stripe so a receipt can be issued.
• OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service — turns an address into map coordinates, so the address text you type is sent there. Your name and number are not.
• Vercel — runs the website and the app.
• A lawful request — we respond to valid legal process.

We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not share it with third parties or affiliates for their marketing. That includes your mobile number: consent to be texted by Freedom Rides is never passed on to anybody else. We do not use your rides or your messages to train machine-learning models.

One case is worth spelling out. Freedom Rides runs on a roster of neighbors, so the person running the service may already have you in their own phone contacts. Where they have connected that address book, the app reads it — read-only — and uses the number and email saved against your name to fill in or correct your record. Nothing about you is written back to their address book, and no contact of theirs becomes a customer of ours automatically.

• Stop the texts — reply STOP to any message. Booking needs a code by text, so this also stops you booking until you reply START.
• Turn off ride notifications — each kind can be switched off in your account settings, one by one.
• See what we hold, correct it, or have it deleted — ask through the contact form and we will deal with it. Some ride and payment records have to be kept for the accounts even after an account is closed; where that applies we keep the trip and the money and detach it from you.

Four answers. Three of them are periods we chose and can change here; the fourth is not a period at all.

• Where a car was — kept for as long as it is there, and no longer. The only automatic deletion in the whole service, and the only piece of this page that is not a promise we keep by hand: the position is overwritten by the next reading and removed by the database itself when the trip ends. See where the car is, while it is on its way to you, above.
• Rides, fares and payments — seven years. A completed trip is an accounting record as well as a memory. A tax question or an argument about a charge can arrive a long time after the ride, and the record is the only thing that settles it.
• Messages, sent notifications and the staff action trail — two years. What you wrote to us, what we texted or emailed you about a ride, and which staff member changed what. Long enough to answer “who did that, and when?”, and no longer.
• Your account — for as long as you have one. Ask us to close it and we close it. What outlives it is the ride and payment history above, detached from you.

Being straight about how that happens, because it is the part most policies fudge: apart from the driver's position, nothing in the app deletes records on a timer. The three periods above are honoured by hand, at review, by the people running the service. If you would rather not wait for a review, ask through the contact form and your records are dealt with individually.

Accounts are protected by a code sent to your phone rather than a password you might reuse. Traffic is encrypted in transit and the database is encrypted at rest. Access to data is scoped per customer account in the database itself, so one company's riders can never be read from another's. Card numbers never reach our servers. No system is perfect, and if something looks wrong please tell us straight away through the contact form.

Freedom Ridesis meant for adults, and we never ask anyone's date of birth — so we cannot tell a rider's age from their account. We do not aim this service at children under 13 and do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us something, tell us and we will remove it. The rule about who may ride unaccompanied is in our Terms of Service.

When our practices change, this page changes and the date at the top moves. If a change matters to riders we will say so by text or email before it takes effect.