Jouw privacy op Polarsteps
The Polarsteps app lets you control how you share your trips and who can see them. Show the world your journey, keep just a select group of followers up to date, or save every detail just for you.
Privacy first
Full control over your profile and trips
You trust us with your data and privacy, and we treat it responsibly.
Who can view your profile
Anyone
Only people I accept
When you create your profile, Polarsteps limits access to it by default. From day one, you are always notified if somebody wants to follow you, and only people you accept as followers can see your profile. You can choose to adjust the settings to allow anyone to automatically follow you.
Who can see your trips
Only me
PRIVATE
Followers
ANYONE WITH THE SECRET LINK
Everyone
ANYONE WITH LINK
Polarsteps lets you decide the appropriate privacy level for each individual trip. Tell the world about your adventures, restrict access to just your followers, or set your trip to private so only you can see it. By default, all trips are automatically set to ‘Followers’ only.
Our Travel Tracker
Location privacy
Our automatic Travel Tracker is known for its accuracy in logging your route. To give you control over how your location is displayed in the app, we offer extra privacy features before, during, and after your trip.
Enable or disable Travel Tracker. You can enable and disable the Travel Tracker in your Trip settings at any time. When your adventure ends, we don't want to track your movements! For added location privacy, we’ve added a new feature: if you approach your home town before your trip's end date, the app will prompt you to switch off your Travel Tracker.
Show or hide start location. At the beginning of your trip, you can mask your starting point to keep your home location private. Simply toggle off ‘show start location’ and nobody apart from you will be able to see it on the map.
Show or hide live location. When you’re on the road, choose whether or not to make your real-time location visible in the app. Keep our 'show live location' feature switched on if you want family and friends to know exactly where you are, or toggle it off to make your current location private.
Protecting users
We always have your privacy and online safety front of mind
Feedback. We listen to your feedback and feature requests, especially when it comes to privacy and online safety.
Clarity. Our Privacy Policy is written in plain English to be as clear as possible about issues surrounding your data and privacy.
Your data. You can find out what data we hold about you, request data removal, and delete your account (and associated data) at any time. We will never sell your data.
Updates. We are continuously working to update and improve our privacy features. We communicate new releases on our website, on social media, and in the Polarsteps app.
Communication. Our dedicated Customer & Support team share detailed explanations of how privacy at Polarsteps works via our Help Center.
Transparency. When you change your profile or Trip settings, the app explains the effects these changes could have on your online privacy.
Security. Our Engineering team monitors the security measures in place to protect your privacy. These are also audited externally. We regularly reassess how much of your data we need to request and store.
FAQ
Everything you need to know about privacy at Polarsteps.
Who can see my trips, photos, locations and bio on Polarsteps?
Trips, photos, locations
You choose who sees your trips.
There are two settings that determine who can see this information: your account type and your trip privacy level. By default, both settings prevent public sharing. Please be careful when choosing to override these privacy settings and making trips public. Once a trip is public, anyone can see it.
For everyone who creates a new Polarsteps account, the account type (”Who can follow me?”) is set to “Only people I accept”. When another user wants to follow you, you will receive a notification and you can choose to accept or decline their follow request. Only after accepting a follow request can this person see the trips you’ve made available to followers.
Don’t want to make all your trips accessible to your followers? You can use the privacy settings for each individual trip to determine who can view each trip and the photos, text, locations, and statistics in it.
By default, the ”Who can see this trip?” setting for every new trip you add to Polarsteps is set to “Followers”. You can change this privacy level to “Only me” or “Everyone” when creating a new trip or at any point.
When you have added Travel Buddies to a trip, the “Only me” privacy level will mean only you and Travel Buddies.
If you change a trip’s privacy level to “Everyone”, this means that your trip with all published Steps and their content, your route, and trip statistics are visible publicly by anyone visiting your profile. If you wish to keep full control over your trip visibility, we don’t recommend selecting “Everyone”.
Bio
Anyone can see the following basic profile information: your profile picture, name, number of followers, mutual followers, home city, and home country.
It is not possible to hide this account information from the search results, as this is how people find and follow people, but you may choose to use a pseudonym and you are not required to upload a profile picture.
Who can follow me on Polarsteps?
By default, your account privacy settings will be set to “Only people I accept”. This means that you will receive a notification for every follow request, which you can accept or decline. Only after accepting a follow request will the person see trips you’ve chosen to share with followers.
If you wish, you can change your account settings to automatically accept everyone that wants to follow you. You can do this by changing “Who can follow me” to “Anyone”. If you choose “Anyone”, anybody in the world could follow you, and if you don’t notice the new follower notification, you may not notice they’ve started to follow you. Please be careful when choosing to set it to “Anyone”, as it means all future follow requests will be automatically accepted and this will give anyone access to any trips that aren’t set to “Only me”.
Who can see my “Followers only” trips on Polarsteps?
Trips set to “Followers only” are visible to the people who follow you on Polarsteps, plus anyone you've shared a secret link with (or anyone who has received that secret link from someone or somewhere else) for that trip.
Your account privacy settings for “Who can follow me” are by default set to “Only people I accept”, which means you have to manually approve follow requests. You can choose to set these settings to “Anyone”, which means people can follow you automatically without your approval. You'll still get a notification every time someone new follows you, so you can check who they are, but we recommend being cautious with choosing to set this to “Anyone”.
If you’re at all worried about who can view your “Followers only” trips, we recommend going through your followers and removing anyone you don't recognize or trust: See how to remove followers. At any time, you can also change your trips privacy settings to “Only me”, so trips are kept fully private, visible to no one but you.
How do secret links work?
A secret link allows you to share your trip with those who don’t follow you; with anyone who has that link, regardless of whether they have a Polarsteps account (and therefore use the app) or not. This means it’s really important to be careful about sharing this link, as someone might then share it with someone else (who shares it with someone else, etc.). If you want to limit your trip to followers only and want to be in full control who sees your trip and whereabouts, best not to share the secret link with anyone and ask your friends and family to follow you in the app instead.
In the app, you can share a trip link in two ways:
Share a “Followers only” link to your trip to share it with anyone who follows you
Share an “Anyone with the secret link” link to share your trip with anyone, including people without an account. If you share this link, anyone on the internet with that link will be able to see your trip.
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