Privacy Policy

1. Overview

TripTally is a local-first financial tracking application designed for gig economy workers — drivers and couriers for platforms such as Uber, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, Amazon Flex, Grubhub, Airbnb, Etsy, Fiverr, and others.

This Privacy Policy explains what information TripTally accesses on your device, how it is stored, what permissions the app requires and why, and the limited circumstances under which data may leave your device.

2. What We Collect & Why

Location Data (GPS)

Used exclusively for tracking trip mileage when you start a trip. GPS coordinates are processed on-device to calculate distance traveled and to draw your trip route. Location data is stored locally on your device and is never transmitted to TripTally or any third party. Location tracking only occurs while you are actively recording a trip or have explicitly enabled automatic trip detection.

Camera (Receipt Scanning)

Used exclusively for capturing photographs of receipts so they can be attached to expenses and processed via on-device OCR. Receipt images are stored locally on your device. Images are not uploaded to any server. OCR (text extraction) is performed on-device using Google ML Kit — see Third-Party Services below.

Financial Data

Information you voluntarily enter into the app, including:

• Earnings — income amounts, hours worked, and trip counts from your gig platforms
• Expenses — descriptions, amounts, categories, dates, and attached receipt images
• Mileage — trip start/end points, distance, and routes
• Tax information — filing status, state of residence, and other details used for quarterly tax estimates
• Notes — any free-text notes you attach to trips, expenses, or earnings

All financial data is stored locally on your device in IndexedDB (the device's built-in database). None of this data is transmitted to TripTally servers — we do not operate any.

What We Do Not Collect

TripTally does not collect any of the following:

• Account information — there is no sign-up, no account, no profile
• Analytics or usage data
• Device identifiers, advertising IDs, or fingerprints
• IP addresses
• Crash reports sent to TripTally servers
• Cookies, pixels, or web beacons

3. How Data Is Stored

All data generated by TripTally is stored locally on your device using IndexedDB, a standard browser-based database technology built into the operating system. This means:

• Your data never leaves your device unless you explicitly choose to back it up.
• There is no TripTally server, cloud database, or remote storage system.
• Your data is as secure as your device itself. If your device is protected with a PIN, password, or biometric lock, your TripTally data is protected by the same mechanism.
• Uninstalling the app or clearing the app's data/cache will permanently delete all your TripTally data from the device.

Optional Google Drive Backup

TripTally offers an optional, user-initiated backup feature that allows you to save a copy of your data to your own Google Drive account. This feature:

• Is entirely opt-in. You must sign in with your Google account and explicitly initiate the backup.
• Stores your backup file directly in a dedicated TripTally folder inside your own Google Drive.
• Does not route your data through TripTally servers. The backup is a direct transfer between your device and Google Drive.
• Can be disabled or deleted at any time from within the app or from your Google Drive.

On-Device Diagnostics Log

To help explain a trip that was cut short or never recorded, the Android app keeps a small diagnostics log on your device. It records how trip tracking ran: when the tracking service started and stopped and why, when and why each trip ended, counts of GPS readings used or rejected and their accuracy, whether Android dozed, restricted or closed the app, battery-optimization and permission status, and the app and Android versions.

• It contains no locations — no coordinates, addresses or routes. It does contain trip times and distances.
• It is stored in the app's private storage, is limited to about 1 MB, and replaces its oldest entries as it grows.
• It is never sent automatically — not to TripTally, and not with Google Drive or automatic backups.
• It leaves your device only if you share it yourself: from Settings → About → Diagnostics log, or inside a backup or copy that you export yourself.
• You can view its size, share it, or delete it at any time from the same screen. Uninstalling the app deletes it.

4. Permissions

TripTally requests the following device permissions. Each is used for a specific, limited purpose and none result in personal data being sent to TripTally.

Location (Foreground & Background)

For trip mileage tracking. Background location is used only when you have started a trip or enabled automatic trip detection, so the trip can continue recording when your screen is off. Location data stays on your device.

Camera

For capturing receipt photos for expense tracking. Photos are stored locally and processed on-device.

Bluetooth

For optional automatic trip detection. When you pair TripTally with your vehicle's Bluetooth, the app can automatically start and stop trip recording as you connect to or disconnect from your car. No Bluetooth data is logged or transmitted.

Notifications

For local reminders about IRS quarterly tax deadlines, trial expirations, and trip status. Notifications are generated entirely on-device. No push tokens or identifiers are sent to any server.

Internet Access

The app connects to no TripTally server. It makes exactly three kinds of network connection: (a) Pro subscriptions — each time the app opens or comes back to the screen it checks your subscription status with RevenueCat, using an anonymous ID, and buying or restoring Pro goes through RevenueCat and your app store; (b) the optional Google Drive backup, to your own Drive — once you sign in, a daily automatic backup is on unless you switch it off; and (c) the optional detailed trip map, which loads map tiles from OpenStreetMap. (b) and (c) never happen unless you turn them on. Receipt scanning, on both platforms, happens entirely on your phone and sends nothing. TripTally does not use internet access to transmit your financial data, trip data, location data, or any other personal information to TripTally.

Feedback and Support

Feedback is sent only by email. The in-app feedback form shows you the complete message — your rating, your comment, the app version and your platform and OS version (for example “Android 15”) — and then opens your own email app addressed to [email protected]. Nothing is sent until you press Send there, and you can edit or delete anything first. If you email us, we receive what you send and your email address, and use them only to reply.

5. Third-Party Services

TripTally integrates with a small number of third-party services. None of these receive your financial data, trip data, or expense records.

RevenueCat (Subscription Management)

TripTally uses RevenueCat to process and verify optional Pro subscription purchases made through Google Play (Android) or the App Store (iPhone). RevenueCat may receive:

• An anonymous app user identifier generated locally by the app
• Purchase and subscription status information from Google Play or the App Store
• Basic device information required for transaction processing

RevenueCat does not receive any of your earnings, expenses, mileage, location, receipts, or tax data. RevenueCat's privacy policy: revenuecat.com/privacy.

Google Drive (Optional Backup)

If — and only if — you enable the optional backup feature, TripTally uses Google OAuth to authenticate your Google account and write a backup file to your own Google Drive. This integration:

• Uses Google's standard OAuth 2.0 authentication flow.
• Requests only the minimum scope needed to read and write files in TripTally's dedicated app folder on your Drive.
• Does not grant TripTally access to your email, contacts, calendar, or any other Google services.
  Correction, September 2026: until version 3.6.15 the sign-in also asked for permission to see your e-mail address, purely so the backup screen could show which account was connected, and that address was stored on your device. From 3.6.16 the app no longer asks for it, and any address already stored is deleted the next time you open the app.
• Passes through mytriptally.com during sign-in. Google will not send users back to an app that has no web address, so the Google sign-in page returns to a page on mytriptally.com, which hands the result to the app. That page is ours, not a third party's, and this happens only while you are signing in to Drive. Nothing about your trips, earnings or expenses goes through it — the backup file itself travels straight from your phone to your Drive.
• Does not send any of your data to TripTally servers — authentication and file transfer occur directly between your device and Google.

Google's privacy policy applies to data stored in your Drive: policies.google.com/privacy.

OpenStreetMap (Optional Detailed Trip Map)

The detailed trip map is off until you turn it on. When it is on, the app downloads map tiles for the area of each trip you view from OpenStreetMap’s tile servers. Like any website, those servers see your IP address and which tiles were requested, which reveals the approximate area of the trip. Your trip route, times, mileage and earnings are never sent. With the map off, no tiles are downloaded. OpenStreetMap’s privacy policy: osmfoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_Policy.

Google ML Kit and Apple Vision (On-Device OCR)

TripTally uses Google ML Kit to extract text from receipt images for expense auto-fill. ML Kit text recognition runs entirely on-device — receipt images and the extracted text are not sent to Google's servers as part of OCR. The ML Kit model is bundled with the app and runs locally. Correction, September 2026: until version 3.6.15, Google's ML Kit library started itself every time the app process started — including starts triggered by your car connecting, with no screen shown — and sent Google a usage message about itself. It contained none of your data: no receipts, no text, no trips. But it was traffic to Google that this policy said did not happen, on phones whose owners may never have used the receipt scanner at all. From version 3.6.16 ML Kit does not start until you actually scan a receipt, so if you never use the scanner, nothing about ML Kit reaches Google. Even then, up to version 3.6.32 ML Kit queued usage statistics about itself (never your receipts or their text) after a scan and uploaded them to Google later. From version 3.6.33 the component that uploads them is removed from the app, so nothing about ML Kit reaches Google even when you scan.

On iPhone, receipts are read with Apple’s Vision framework, which is part of iOS and also runs entirely on the device. If on-device reading fails on either platform, you enter the receipt by hand; there is no downloadable fallback.

Corrections, October 2026. Four things in versions up to 3.6.32 (build 104) did not match this policy, and are removed in the next version: (1) the app loaded its font from Google Fonts each time it started, which showed Google your IP address; (2) if ML Kit failed to start or to read a receipt, the app could fall back to a text-recognition engine (Tesseract.js) downloaded from a public CDN; and (3) pressing Submit in the feedback form sent your rating, your comment, the app build and your device’s browser identification string (user-agent) to a TripTally feedback service on mytriptally.com; and (4) after you scanned a receipt on Android, Google’s ML Kit queued usage statistics about itself and uploaded them to Google later. None of these carried your earnings, trips, expenses or location. Feedback is now email-only, the font ships inside the app, there is no fallback download, and ML Kit’s upload component is removed.

Google Play Store and Apple App Store

If you install TripTally from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, Google or Apple may collect information about installation and usage as described in their own privacy policies. This collection is performed by Google or Apple, not by TripTally.

6. Data Sharing

The only circumstances under which your data may leave your device are:

• Google Drive backup — only if you explicitly enable it, and the data goes directly to your own Google Drive account.
• Manual export — if you use the in-app export feature to generate a CSV file, that file is saved to your device and shared only via methods you choose (email, messaging, etc.).
• RevenueCat — limited subscription-related data as described above. Never your financial records.

7. Data Retention & Deletion

Because all data is stored locally on your device, you have full control over its retention and deletion. TripTally does not retain copies of your data anywhere — there are no servers to retain it on.

You can delete your data at any time using any of these methods:

• Delete individual records — remove any trip, expense, earning entry, or receipt from within the app.
• Clear all data — open TripTally → Settings → "Clear All Data" to wipe every record from your device immediately and permanently.
• Android Settings — Settings → Apps → TripTally → Storage → Clear Data.
• Uninstall — uninstalling TripTally permanently removes all locally stored app data.
• Google Drive backups — open Google Drive, navigate to the TripTally app folder, and delete the backup files. Uninstalling the app does not automatically remove Drive backups.

8. Children's Privacy

TripTally is not directed at children under the age of 13 (or the applicable age of digital consent in your jurisdiction) and is intended for adult gig workers tracking self-employment income and expenses. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because TripTally stores all data locally on the user's device and does not transmit data to any server, there is no mechanism by which we could collect a child's personal information.

If you believe a child has used TripTally in a manner that raises privacy concerns, please contact us at the email address below.

9. Security

TripTally's local-first architecture is itself a security measure. Because your data never leaves your device (unless you explicitly back it up to your own Google Drive), the attack surface for data breaches is minimal:

• There are no TripTally servers to breach.
• There are no TripTally databases containing user data.
• There are no user accounts or credentials stored by TripTally.
• Your data is protected by your device's own security features (screen lock, encryption, etc.).

We recommend keeping your device's operating system and security features up to date to protect all data stored on it, including TripTally data.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the app's features or applicable laws. When we make changes:

• The "Effective" date at the top of this page will be revised.
• For material changes, we will provide notice through the app or on our website.
• Continued use of TripTally after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically.

11. Contact

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or TripTally's data practices, please contact us at:

We will make every effort to respond to your inquiry in a timely manner.