Hills Ahead privacy policy

Last updated November 10, 2026

Hills Ahead is an app from Hyphen Labs LLC that draws your road trip as a picture for the people in the back seat. This page explains what the app does with your information. In short: there are no accounts, no ads and no analytics, your location history stays on your phone, and we never sell your data or use it for ads.

Your location

Hills Ahead uses your phone's location to move the car along the trip. If you allow location "all the time", it keeps following the trip while the screen is off, and Android shows a notification while it does. If you don't, the app follows the trip only while it's open. The trail of where you've been is kept on your phone and is never sent to us.

What leaves your phone

To build a trip, the app sends some places to our server, which looks things up for it:

• Searching for a place: what you type, and your rough position so that nearby results come first.
• Pasting a map link: the link, so that the server can read the places in it.
• "Use my location": your current position, to find its name.
• The trip: its start, stops and end, to get the route, the hills and the landmarks along it.
• Weather: a few points along the route, starting from where you are now (rounded to within about a mile before any weather service sees it).
• Fun facts: the names of the landmarks on the route.

Searches, place names and fun facts also carry your phone's language (for example "fr"), so that answers come back in it where they can.

None of these carries your name, an account, an advertising ID or a device ID. The app doesn't send anything else.

"Use my location" also asks your phone's own system geocoder for the street address. On Android that's a service of Google, under Google's privacy policy.

Who else sees it

Our server passes these requests on to the services that answer them. They see what's needed for the request and the address of our server, not yours:

• Mapbox: place search, routes, elevation and place names.
• The US National Weather Service and Apple Weather: forecasts.
• Google, only when you paste a Google Maps link, to open it.

Our server runs on Cloudflare.

Landmarks and fun facts come from Wikipedia and Wikidata, but from a copy we download once a month, so they don't see your trips. Tapping "From Wikipedia" under a fact opens that page on Wikipedia, under the Wikimedia privacy policy.

What we keep

• Request logs. Cloudflare keeps a log of requests to our server, including the places in them, so we can fix problems and watch costs. The logs are deleted automatically after at most 7 days. We use your IP address only to stop anyone from sending too many requests, and we don't store it.
• Cached answers. To keep the app fast and costs low, the server remembers answers such as a route, its landmarks or a forecast for a while (from 30 minutes to 30 days). They're filed by place, not by person, and nothing in them says who asked.

On your phone

The app keeps your last few trips (so they work with no signal), your stickers, points and unlocks, your road game progress and the riders' names you type in for the games on your phone. Stickers are stored as names and dates, not places. Riders' names are never sent anywhere.

If your phone's backup is on (Android backup to your Google account, or iCloud on an iPhone), it includes your settings and the sticker book: stickers, points, miles ridden and license plates spotted. Saved trips, riders' names and any record of where you've been are left out. That backup belongs to you and your phone's maker; we can't see it.

You can remove a saved trip in the app; uninstalling the app or clearing its data removes all of it.

Children

Hills Ahead is made to be used by families, and it is set up for a parent. It has no accounts, chat, ads, analytics or tracking, and it doesn't ask anyone for their name, email or any other personal information. Trip requests aren't linked to a person, child or adult.

Where it's handled

Hyphen Labs LLC is based in the United States, and our server and the services above may handle requests in the United States and other countries. Where the law of the UK or the European Union requires it, those transfers rely on safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

For riders in the UK, Ireland and the EU

Hyphen Labs LLC is the controller of the information described here. We handle it:

• to provide the app you asked for: looking up the trip, its places, facts and weather (contract);
• to keep the service working, affordable and safe from abuse: the request logs, cached answers and request limits by IP address (our legitimate interests, which these short-lived, unlinked records don't outweigh for you).

You have the right to ask for access to your information, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to how it's handled, or to restrict it. Since nothing we keep is tied to a person, we usually can't find anything that's yours, but write to us and we'll check. You can also complain to your data protection authority: the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, or the one where you live.

Your choices

• You can turn off location, or limit it to while the app is open, in your phone's settings. Without location you can still plan a trip and look at it.
• Because we don't know who sent a request, we can't look up or delete a particular person's requests, but the logs are gone within 7 days anyway.
• Questions? Email andrew.miller@hyphenlabsllc.com.

Changes

If the app starts handling data differently, we'll update this page and the date at the top before the new version is released.