Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 16, 2026

Smart Commute helps travelers understand crossing conditions between Singapore and Malaysia. This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, and how the app handles the optional crowd-sensing pilot.

What we collect

Account and profile data

• Email address and basic sign-in details when you create an account
• Optional profile details you choose to add
• Guest-session identifiers when you use the app without a full account

We use this data to authenticate you, keep your preferences, and support app features such as reporting and personalization.

App usage and diagnostics

• Analytics events that help us understand feature usage
• Device and app state needed to keep the service running, including push-notification tokens
• On ad-supported screens, advertising or device identifiers, ad interactions, approximate location or network-derived location, and ad-related diagnostics that advertising SDKs may process

We use this data to improve performance, safety, and product quality, operate advertising, and measure ad delivery. Advertising SDKs may use some of this data to track activity across apps or websites when platform rules and your consent permit it.

Community contributions

• Reports, comments, replies, votes, and other content you submit
• Moderation and abuse-prevention metadata related to those contributions
• Block-list preferences used to hide other community members from your feed and thread views

We use this data to operate the community features and keep the service useful and safe.

Feedback you send us

When you send feedback from inside the app, your message arrives in our email inbox together with your email address and your account identifier, so that we can reply. Because that is ordinary email and not part of your account record, it is not reached by account deletion — see below.

Alerts and ad preferences

• Checkpoint-specific traffic alert subscriptions that you explicitly enable
• Device-level notification permission state
• Ad-consent state, including Apple tracking permission on iOS and any consent choices collected by an advertising privacy message

We use this data to send the alerts you request and to keep ad-supported surfaces aligned with your consent choices. Production Android ad requests are currently disabled until the app includes a reviewed consent-management flow.

Approach reminders

Approach reminders are off by default and are turned on from notification settings. They are the only feature that uses location while the app is in the background.

If you turn them on, the app asks your device to tell it when you enter an area about 900 metres across around the Woodlands or Tuas checkpoint. Your device does the watching: we do not receive a location trail, and no coordinate ever leaves your phone. The permission involved is background location — Always on iOS, and the background-location permission on Android — and the reminders stay off if it is not granted.

When a reminder fires, the app records on your phone which of the two checkpoints it was and when, and sends one analytics event naming which checkpoint was approached. That event is the only thing about this feature that leaves your device. The two areas are watched until you turn the feature off, which stops all of it.

Near me in Community

Near me is off until you tap Use my location in Community. The app then reads one approximate position, works out on your phone whether you are nearer the Woodlands or the Tuas checkpoint, and keeps only that answer while the app is open. The position is not sent to us, stored or logged, and no analytics event is sent about it. It uses when-in-use location permission; without it, Community lists the newest conversations first.

Public travel-time accuracy study

The Travel Time Accuracy Study is off by default and only runs when all of the following are true:

• you enable the study
• you grant when-in-use location permission
• you explicitly start a study session
• the app is in the foreground

When the study is active, the public App Store build records:

• coarse zone-entry and zone-exit events
• timestamps, confidence, and GPS accuracy
• session-scoped identifiers that rotate per study session

What we do not store for the public study

• no raw GeoPoint trail
• no continuous background tracking in the App Store build
• no Wi-Fi SSID or BSSID collection
• no long-lived user movement identifier

Optional crowd-sensing pilot

Crowd sensing is off by default and only runs when all of the following are true:

• you opt in
• you grant the required permissions
• you start an active commute session
• the app is in the foreground

When the pilot is active, the app may collect:

• a low-frequency location sample
• a short Bluetooth scan burst that counts nearby devices
• derived values such as GPS accuracy, approximate distance to the selected corridor, confidence, and signal score

The current pilot is designed to support nearby queue hints and future corridor-level calibration. It is not intended to build a raw travel history.

What we do not store for the sensing pilot

• no raw location trail or continuous GPS history
• no Bluetooth MAC addresses
• no Bluetooth device names
• no hidden background sensing outside an active commute session

Sample envelopes use a commute-session identifier instead of a long-lived user movement identifier.

How we use data

We use collected data to:

• show live commute information and recommendations
• improve forecasts and route-level insights
• support moderation, reliability, and fraud-prevention workflows
• evaluate sensing quality, battery impact, and calibration during pilot work
• compare public travel-time estimates against opt-in study sessions
• display and measure ads on supported ad-enabled screens

We do not sell your personal information.

Sharing

We use service providers and platform infrastructure needed to run the app, including Firebase and related Google services for hosting, authentication, analytics, messaging and storage, and Google Mobile Ads and its configured mediation partners for advertising. Those providers may process data on our behalf under their own privacy terms. Ad providers may receive device or advertising identifiers, ad interactions, approximate location or network information, and diagnostics; on iOS, the linked ad stack can engage in tracking when you authorize tracking. We do not provide optional crowd-sensing sample envelopes to build advertising profiles.

Moderation. If another person reports something you posted, we send the text of that post to Google's Perspective service, which scores it for likely toxicity and helps us decide what to do. We send the text only — never your name or account identifier. This happens because someone reported the post, so it is not something you can switch off other than by not posting.

Retention

• Account and contribution data are retained as needed to operate the service and comply with legal or abuse-prevention obligations.
• Fuel-check reports, including a salted hash derived from the submitting account ID, are marked with a 180-day retention date, but automatic expiry is not currently enforced.
• Optional sensing sample envelopes are retained for up to 7 days for calibration and trust work, not permanent movement storage.
• Corridor snapshot aggregates derived from those envelopes are retained for up to 14 days.
• The live per-corridor snapshot feed used by the app is short-lived and retained for up to 24 hours before it expires.
• Some study, sensing and traffic measurements keep session-scoped pseudonymous hashes after direct account IDs are removed. Some legacy measurement records do not yet have an enforced automatic expiry; you can contact us to request a manual review.

Your choices

• You can use much of the app without opting into crowd sensing.
• Traffic alerts stay off until you enable them for a checkpoint.
• You can turn crowd sensing off at any time in the app settings.
• You can stop a commute session at any time.
• You can enable or stop a study session at any time.
• You can deny location or Bluetooth access and continue using the rest of the app.
• On iOS, you can deny Apple tracking permission and receive contextual or non-personalized ads instead. You can also use device privacy and notification controls.

Account deletion

You can request account deletion from the app profile screen. The app asks our service to remove associated account and server-side preference data before it removes the sign-in account. It removes or de-identifies supported alerts, votes, direct account IDs on sensing and study submissions, and community identity fields associated with the account.

Deletion does not remove every record. Community reports and replies remain under “Deleted user”; moderation reports remain under a randomized reporter identifier; traffic, study and sensing measurements may retain session-scoped pseudonymous hashes; and fuel-check reports may retain the salted account hash described above. Subscription records kept for refund or chargeback handling are marked with a 180-day retention date, but automatic expiry is not currently enforced. Unauthenticated website enquiries and legacy records whose ownership cannot be determined are not matched by the automated account-deletion process. Feedback you have sent us from inside the app arrives as email rather than as part of your account record, so deleting your account does not delete it; write to us if you want those messages removed too. We may also retain or de-identify records when reasonably needed for safety, fraud prevention, moderation, legal compliance, dispute handling, or non-personal aggregate service integrity.

Deleting an account does not clear traffic-alert switches saved on the device and does not currently guarantee that the device is unsubscribed from each Firebase messaging topic. Turn those alerts off before deletion, or use the device’s notification controls or clear the app’s data afterward. If automated cleanup cannot finish, the app reports that the request is incomplete so you can retry or contact us; it does not intentionally present a partial cleanup as completed.

If you cannot access the in-app flow, email causewaysmartcommute@gmail.com and use “SmartCommute account deletion request” as the subject. When possible, write from the address linked to the account or include the profile nickname; we may ask for additional information to verify the request without requiring access to an address you can no longer use.

Contact

For privacy questions, contact: causewaysmartcommute@gmail.com