What we hold, and why.
Last updated 2026-09-06
plotholes.app is run by Tristan Watson, trading as plotholes.app, in the United Kingdom. We are the data controller for everything on this page. Reach us at tristan@triwats.com.
The short version
Browse the map without an account — we never need to know who you are. Sign in and connect a ride and you are part of the network: the spots you tapped join the shared map. We keep the spots, never your route. Nothing has been sold to anyone.
Browsing without an account
No account, no sign-in, no profile. Our host, Cloudflare, handles your request and sees your IP address to serve the page and stop abuse. We don't build a profile from it.
If you sign in
- Your email — to sign you in with a magic link. No passwords.
- A display name and km/miles, if you give them.
- A Strava connection, if you make one: your Strava athlete ID and access tokens, encrypted at rest.
- A list of rides you've analysed — name, how many holes, when, and a fingerprint of the ride so we don't count the same one twice.
- The spots you tapped — latitude and longitude of the tap, which connector it came from, which ride, a confidence score, the time we recorded it, and the local authority district the point falls in. That is the entire record. We do not keep your route, your ride file, your speed, or your heart rate.
What being signed in means
Anyone can browse. The moment you connect a ride or upload a file, the spots you tapped go into the shared map — that is what an account here is for, and there is no separate switch. If you would rather not contribute, browse without connecting anything. To stop after you have started, delete your account (below).
What's on the public map
Every tapped spot is on the map, at street level. Until three different riders have tapped roughly the same spot (within about 25 metres) it shows as observed — one rider, not yet confirmed. At three it becomes confirmed. If nothing new is tapped there for 180 days it goes quiet and is marked as possibly repaired.
Each point on the map carries: its position, how many riders and how many taps, when it was first and last seen, confidence and severity scores, the local authority district, and a tally of which connector types produced it. It never carries your name, your email, your ride, or any part of your route.
Observed points are public before they are confirmed, so a single ride of yours can put a visible dot on the map. Tap where you're content to be seen tapping — the same care you'd take with a public Strava activity.
Strava
Strava is a connector, nothing more. With your permission we read the activity you ask us to analyse (and new rides automatically, if you enable that), take the lap taps out of it, and write nothing back unless you separately switch on ride-description write-back. We cache an analysed ride for up to six days to save API calls, then it's deleted. Disconnect any time in your settings.
Why we're allowed to hold it (lawful basis)
- Your account, signing you in, showing you your own rides — performing our agreement with you (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
- Putting the spots you tapped into the shared map — the same agreement. Contributing is the service, not an add-on. We deliberately don't call this “consent”: consent has to be a free choice you could decline and carry on regardless, and here it isn't one.
- Area statistics, and any future aggregated extract for highways authorities — our legitimate interests in getting roads repaired and running a service that lasts (Article 6(1)(f)). You can object: email us, or delete your account.
- Marketing emails — consent. You get none unless you switch them on in settings, and you can withdraw whenever you like.
We keep a dated record of when you were shown the statement above and which version of this policy it was.
Selling data
We have never sold any data. The intention is aggregated extracts for councils and highways authorities. Before any of that ships, these are the rules we hold ourselves to: only spots confirmed by a set number of distinct riders, aggregated to an area, coordinates rounded, small counts suppressed, and never a row that belongs to one rider. None of it is built yet. When it is, this page changes first.
Cookies and analytics
One essential cookie keeps you signed in. Preferences (sound, map layers) live in your browser, not on our servers. We use Ahrefs Web Analytics for page views — cookieless, no personal data — and Cloudflare Analytics Engine for counts of events like visit, connect, analyse and upload, with a country code and no user identifiers. No advertising or cross-site trackers.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what we hold, correct it, object to the legitimate-interests processing above, or have it erased. Email us; we answer within one month.
Deleting your account (“Delete my account & data” on your impact page) removes your email and account, your Strava connection and tokens, your ride history, cached rides, and your consent record, and unlinks every observation from you. The observations themselves stay on the map with nobody attached — the crowd data is what makes the map work.
How long we keep things
Account data until you delete it · cached rides six days · observations indefinitely as road-condition evidence, with the link to you removed on deletion · analytics roughly 90 days · consent records until you delete your account.
We're a UK service and follow UK GDPR. If we get it wrong, complain to the ICO (ico.org.uk).