Privacy

Privacy · updated 16 September 2026

Braided is a free, non-commercial map of Aotearoa built on open public data. No accounts, no advertising, no analytics, no trackers — almost everything happens on your phone.

The short version

The only thing Braided ever sends us about you is a push notification token, and only if you create a river alert. Create none and we hold nothing about you at all.

Your location, saved places and downloaded regions stay on the phone. There is nowhere in the app to send them.

Reading the map

The app reads static files — rivers, huts, tides, forecasts, map tiles — from our own content delivery network: plain requests for public files, with no account, no cookie and no identifier. As with any web server the network sees the IP address asking; we do not receive or keep those logs.

It never calls a council, DOC, GeoNet, LINZ or a weather service directly, so browsing the map tells those agencies nothing about you.

River alerts, only if you create one

Set an alert on a gauge and the app asks permission to notify you, gets a push token from Apple or Google, and registers it with our alerts service. We then store:

• the push token — a random string addressing this installation on this device
• the platform, iOS or Android
• when we first saw it, when we last heard from it, and how many deliveries have failed
• each alert: which gauge, which condition, whether it is armed, when it last fired
• each notification sent: the time, the reading that triggered it, its wording, and whether Apple or Google accepted it

No account, no email address, no name, no device identifier beyond that token, and nothing linking two installations to one person. The token is also the secret authorising reads and changes to your alerts, so it travels in a request header, never in a web address. We count requests per IP address to throttle abuse; those counts live in memory for a minute and never reach a disk or a log.

Who else handles it

A notification goes from our server to Expo's push service, then Apple's APNs or Google's FCM, then your phone; the token and its text pass through all three. The alerts service runs on one rented virtual server behind Cloudflare, which also serves the map files — both outside New Zealand, so the little we hold is stored and processed overseas.

Links to DOC, GeoNet, FENZ or Civil Defence hand you to your browser and those sites' own terms. The rate-the-app prompt is Apple's or Google's; we are told nothing about it, not even whether it appeared.

What stays on your phone

• Your location, if you grant it — to centre the map and say how far a place is. Never sent anywhere.
• Saved places.
• Downloaded regions: map, terrain, gauges, huts, forecasts and photos.
• A cache of the published files, and a counter deciding whether to ask you for an App Store review.

Deleting the app removes all of it.

How long we keep it

• Your token and alerts: as long as you keep the alerts.
• A token Apple or Google reject 3 times in a row — what happens when the app is deleted — is removed with every alert on it.
• A device with no alerts we have not heard from for 180 days is removed.
• The record of notifications sent is deleted after 90 days.

Everything else in our database is measurements of rivers, rain and the sea. None of it is about you.

Deleting it

The Alerts screen has “Delete my alerts and forget this device”: it removes the token, every alert on it and the record of what was sent, at once and for good. Deleting one alert removes just that one; deleting the app stops the notifications, and the token is cleaned up here the next time a delivery is rejected.

The website

braided.co.nz is separate from the app, and the one place any measurement happens. It uses Cloudflare Web Analytics: page views counted with no cookie and no device identifier, following nobody between sites — the page, the referrer, the country, the kind of browser, never an individual. Nothing you do there is stored, and it asks for nothing.

One thing there leaves the site: the koha button on braided.co.nz/support-us opens a payment page belonging to Stripe, and Stripe's own privacy policy governs that page. We never see a card number. What reaches us is the amount, the date, and whatever name or email address you chose to give Stripe — one voluntary payment, linked to nothing else here. The app is not told: it cannot know whether you have given anything.

Nothing of Stripe's runs on that page. The button is an ordinary link, so Stripe first sees your browser when you click it and land on their page — not while you are reading ours. No page on this site loads anything from a third party.

What we never do

The app carries no advertising network, no analytics, no crash reporting and no attribution code. We do not sell, rent or share anything for marketing, we build no profile of you, and nothing here makes an automated decision about you. Braided is free and non-commercial — no paid tier, no subscription, and no payment information in the app at all: the voluntary koha lives on the website and Stripe handles it end to end.

Your rights

The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the right to ask what personal information we hold about you and to have it corrected or deleted. Here that is a push token, the alerts on it and what we sent to them — and the app shows and deletes all of it without involving us.

If you would rather ask, email pablodenadai@gmail.com; we will need the push token, because it is the only thing we hold and the only way to find anything. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Changes, and who we are

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the new wording ships in the app; anything material will be said plainly rather than buried. Braided is built and run by one person in Aotearoa New Zealand. Questions: pablodenadai@gmail.com.