Your Profile
The profile page (user menu → Your profile) holds your name, phone number, avatar and timezone. The timezone is auto-detected when you sign up and is used to render times in emails and notifications; hike dates themselves are calendar dates and don't shift with timezones. It's also where you choose your units — miles and pounds, or kilometres and kilograms (more on that). Your profile is also where you keep personal emergency contacts and PLBs, ready to pick under From your profile when you add one to a hike (why that matters).
Passwords And Signing In
Forgot your password? Use Forgot password on the login page for an email reset link. Repeated failed logins lock the account briefly to block guessing. Devices you use regularly stay signed in; after a week away you'll be asked to log in again.
Notification Defaults
The Notifications page (user menu) sets your defaults for chat email and push on new hikes — existing hikes keep their per-hike settings. More on notifications.
Plans And Limits
During the beta, every account is Pro — all features, no caps. Post-beta, the Free tier allows 1 active hike as owner and 4 members per hike (including Pack Shadows). Nothing you've already created is ever taken away by a downgrade.
Privacy, In Plain Words
- No ads, no trackers, no third-party analytics. Not as a setting — as policy.
- Your data is used to run the service, full stop. Emails are transactional and safety-related only.
- The only thing our pages fetch from another company is map tiles (OpenTopoMap and Esri), which see your IP address and the area you're looking at. Emails go out through Proton; app notifications go through Google's push service and carry only the hike's name and who sent messages — never what anyone wrote.
- Everything you add to a hike is visible to that hike's members — that's the point of a shared planner. The one exception is a private expense.
- Your emergency contacts, PLBs and emergency notes (including any health details) go further than your pack: every member's safety brief and check-in alerts carry the whole group's emergency details, so their contacts can act too. Add only what you're comfortable sharing that widely. They're deleted from a hike two weeks after it ends, or when it's closed; the copies on your profile stay.
- Your saved routes are yours alone: nobody else can see your library, only the copies you add to hikes.
- The full legal version lives in the Privacy Policy.
Deleting Your Account
Account deletion is self-service and two-step, so it can't happen by accident or by someone borrowing your laptop: request a deletion code (emailed to you), then confirm with the code and your password.
What happens to your data:
- Your profile, contacts, PLBs and personal records are deleted.
- Your saved routes are deleted. A copy you added to a hike stays with that hike, as one of its routes.
- Your contributions to shared hike data (messages, expenses, itinerary items) are anonymised — the group's records stay intact, with your name detached.
- Any armed post-hike check-in is turned off. If your emergency contacts had already been alerted that you hadn't checked in, they're emailed to say the automated alerts have stopped — that notice does not tell them you're safe, so if you are back safe, check in first and then delete.
- If you own hikes with other members, ownership transfers automatically; hikes where you're the only member are deleted.
- A deletion receipt is logged for compliance.
Note: Need a copy of your data, or have a privacy question? Contact privacy@packhiker.com.