1. Introduction and who we are
Pack Hiker ("we", "us", "our") is a collaborative trip-planning platform for multi-day hiking groups. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information when you use Pack Hiker.
This policy is prepared in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), and is also designed to meet the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) where applicable.
For privacy enquiries, contact us at: privacy@packhiker.com
2. What personal information we collect
We collect only the information necessary to provide the Pack Hiker service:
Account information: First name, last name, email address, and optional phone number, collected when you register. We also keep your time zone, detected from your browser, and your display preferences, such as units.
Photos: An optional profile picture you upload to identify yourself to other hike members, and any photo uploaded as a hike's background.
Hike and itinerary data: Trip plans, dates, routes, itinerary entries, food plans, gear packing status and backpack-weight figures you create or contribute to.
Route files (GPX, KML, GeoJSON): Route files you upload for trip planning. We keep each file exactly as uploaded, including any timestamps or other details it contains, and your hike's members can download it. A file recorded on a GPS device can show where and when it was recorded, so check a file before you upload it.
Saved routes: Routes you draw or import into your own route library: their line and elevation, the points you placed, their names, and any waypoints and notes you add. Other Pack Hiker users cannot see your library. Adding a route to a hike gives that hike its own copy, which its members can see like any other route file. Routes you draw are calculated by a routing engine that runs on our own server, so the points you place are not sent to anyone else.
Expense information: Costs, splits, and reimbursements recorded within a hike you participate in, including any private expenses, which only you can see.
Emergency contact details: Names, phone numbers, and email addresses of your emergency contacts, and PLB device registration details, which you voluntarily provide — and, if you turn on the post-hike check-in, your check-in deadline and time zone.
Emergency notes, including health information: Notes you choose to add to a hike's Emergency tab — for example medical conditions, allergies, medications, blood type or dietary needs — so that your group, and the people they notify, can help you in an emergency. You can also add private medical notes, which only you can see and which go only to your own emergency contacts. This is health information, which the law treats as sensitive. We collect it only when you enter it, you can change or delete it at any time, and section 5 explains who receives it.
Messages: Chat messages sent within hike groups.
Device and notification data: If you use the Android app and allow notifications, a push token that identifies your device to Google's push service (see section 5), and which platform you use. It is deleted when you log out on that device or delete your account.
Technical data: IP address and timestamps associated with your requests, retained in server logs for security purposes.
Usage information: The date you last used the website, and the date you last used the mobile app — one date each, overwritten as you go — so we can count how many people use Pack Hiker each week. We do not record what you look at, which features you use, how long you stay, or anything at all about visitors who are not signed in.
What we don't collect: your device's location. The button that shows where you are on a map uses your device's location on your device only; it is never sent to our server. We also remove location data and other embedded details (EXIF metadata) from every photo when it is uploaded.
3. How we collect your information
Most of your information comes from you: when you register, complete your profile, create or join a hike, upload files, draw routes, enter expenses, add emergency information, or send messages.
Some comes from other members. A member may invite you to a hike by email, include you in an expense split or an itinerary entry, or mention you in the chat. Before you have an account, a member may add you to a hike as a Pack Shadow, or list you as their emergency contact — section 10 explains what we hold about people who don't have an account.
A little is collected automatically: your IP address and request times, the two usage dates described in section 2, and, if you allow notifications in the Android app, your device's push token. We do not use cookies (see section 8).
4. Why we collect and use your information
We collect and use your personal information for the following purposes:
Providing and operating the Pack Hiker trip-planning service
Identifying you to other members of hikes you participate in
Sending you account verification and password reset emails
Sending the safety briefs and post-hike check-in alerts that members ask us to send to their emergency contacts
Sending you the notifications you have turned on, such as new chat messages and check-in alerts
Calculating and displaying expense splits and settlements
Ensuring the security of the platform (rate limiting, fraud detection)
Complying with our legal obligations
Legal basis (GDPR): Processing is based on your consent (given at registration), the performance of a contract (providing the service you signed up for), and our legitimate interests in operating a secure platform. Health information in your emergency notes is processed only with your explicit consent: you give it by adding the notes after being shown who will see them, and you can withdraw it at any time by deleting them. Details you add about other people — emergency contacts, people you invite and Pack Shadows — are processed in our and our members' legitimate interest in organising the trip and keeping the group safe, and you are asked to make sure they have agreed before you add their contact or emergency details.
5. Who we share your information with
Other hike members: Everything you add to a hike is visible to all of its members, except private expenses, which only you can see. That includes your name, email address, phone number (if provided), profile picture and time zone; your food plan, gear packing status and backpack-weight figures; your post-hike check-in status and deadline; and your emergency contacts, PLB registrations and emergency notes. Before you join a hike, you are shown, and asked to agree to, your contact details being shared with its members.
Emergency details and who they reach: The safety brief and post-hike check-in alerts are written for the people a member has chosen to notify, and each one carries the whole group's details — every member's name, phone number, email address and profile picture, emergency contacts, PLB registrations and emergency notes — along with the itinerary, routes and route files. Each member's brief and alerts go to that member's own emergency contacts, so your details, including any health information in your notes, reach the emergency contacts of everyone in your group, not only your own. The same details are printed in the PDF exports members create. Private medical notes are the exception: no other member can see them, they are included only in the safety brief you send and the check-in alerts sent about you, which go to your own emergency contacts, and they appear in a PDF export only when you create it and choose to include them.
Publicly shared hike plans: A hike owner can publish an unlisted public link to a simplified, read-only copy of a hike plan. That copy is built to contain no personal information: no dates, no members or assignments, no avatars, no expenses, no food plans, no gear or backpack weights, no chat, and no emergency contacts, PLB registrations, safety briefs or check-in details. The person sharing appears by first name only, or anonymously if they choose. What the copy does carry is the plan itself — routes, days, camps, water points and the free text your hike's planners wrote about them — and the owner is shown every one of those strings and can switch any of them off before publishing. Only the hike owner can publish, revoke or regenerate the link, and every link expires. We take measures to keep shared pages out of search engines — a robots directive and a noindex instruction on the page — but these are directions that search engines generally honour rather than a guarantee, so we cannot promise a shared page will never appear in search results. The page is in any case public to anyone who has the address, and revoking a link cannot recall a copy someone has already read.
No third-party sharing: We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with third parties for marketing or commercial purposes. We do not use third-party analytics services.
Service providers: We use a small number of outside services to run Pack Hiker, and they handle your information only to provide them:
Email: Our emails are sent through Proton (Proton AG, Switzerland), so Proton handles every email we send — including safety briefs and check-in alerts, and the details they carry.
App notifications: Notifications to the Android app are delivered by Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google's push service (Google LLC, United States), which receives your device's push token and each notification. We keep notifications deliberately bare: a chat notification names the hike and who has sent messages, never what anyone wrote, and a check-in notification names the hike and what has happened. Message text, locations, contact and emergency details and expenses are never put in a notification.
Map tiles: The maps in Pack Hiker are drawn from map tiles that your device downloads directly from OpenTopoMap (topographic maps; a volunteer project based in Germany) and Esri (satellite imagery and street maps; Esri Inc., United States), including the satellite pictures of your saved routes and any maps you save for offline use in the app. As with any website your device contacts, those services receive your IP address and which tiles are requested, which shows the area of the map being viewed. They receive nothing from your Pack Hiker account, such as your name or email address. The maps in a PDF export or a safety brief are drawn on our server, so those tile requests come from our server rather than from your device.
Everything else — including the routing engine that calculates the routes you draw — runs on our own server.
Overseas recipients: Because of these services, some of your information is disclosed to recipients in Switzerland (Proton), the United States (Google and Esri) and Germany (OpenTopoMap).
Legal requirements: We may disclose your information where required by law, court order, or to protect the safety of individuals.
If Pack Hiker changes hands: If the service is transferred to a new operator — for example a company formed to run it, or someone who takes it over — your information will be transferred with it. The new operator will be bound by this policy for the information collected under it, and we will tell you before the transfer happens.
6. Data storage and security
Pack Hiker is self-hosted software. Our database and the files you upload are stored on a private server controlled by the platform operator, not on a cloud platform shared with other organisations; the service providers in section 5 handle only what is described there. Passwords are hashed using bcrypt and are never stored in plain text. All communication is encrypted in transit using HTTPS.
We implement technical security measures including rate limiting on authentication endpoints, account lockout after repeated failed login attempts, and single-use password reset tokens with expiry times. No security measure is 100% effective, and we encourage you to use a strong, unique password.
Data breaches: If a data breach involving your personal information is likely to result in serious harm to you, we will tell you as soon as we can — what happened, what information was involved and what you can do to protect yourself — and we will notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and any other regulator, where the law requires.
7. Data retention
Your personal information is retained for as long as you maintain an account with us. When you delete your account, your profile, email, phone number, profile picture, and saved routes are permanently deleted. Financial records (expense splits) and hike contributions are anonymised rather than deleted, to preserve the integrity of shared financial records for other participants (see section 9 — Your rights). A copy of one of your saved routes that you added to a hike is one of that hike's route files, and stays with the hike like your other contributions to it.
A record that an account deletion occurred is retained indefinitely for audit and abuse-prevention purposes, as is a record of each time you accepted these terms or gave one of the consents Pack Hiker asks for. These records do not contain your name or email address. Instead they hold a keyed hash (HMAC) of your email address, which makes them pseudonymised rather than anonymous: we can check whether a given address has a record, but we cannot recover an address from one.
Server access logs containing IP addresses are retained for up to 12 months for security and abuse-prevention purposes, after which they are deleted.
The two usage dates described in section 2 are deleted along with the rest of your profile when you delete your account. The weekly totals calculated from them contain no personal information and are retained indefinitely.
Some information is deleted sooner:
Registrations that are never confirmed are deleted after 30 days.
Invitations, including the email address they were sent to, are deleted 30 days after they are sent, whether or not they were accepted.
An email we could not send at the first attempt waits in a queue while we retry, for up to 7 days. The queued copy is deleted 7 days after it is delivered, or 30 days after it was queued if it never is.
A hike's emergency contacts, PLB registrations and emergency notes are deleted two weeks after the hike ends, or as soon as it is closed. If a member's post-hike check-in alert has gone out and they have not yet checked in, the contacts it was sent to are kept until they do, so those contacts can be told the member is safe. Copies you keep on your profile are not affected.
The map images made for safety briefs are deleted after 45 days.
8. Cookies, device storage and tracking
Pack Hiker does not use cookies. Instead, it keeps some information in your browser's or the app's own storage on your device:
Your sign-in session, and preferences such as your theme and which notices you have dismissed.
A copy of the hikes you belong to, so they open quickly and keep working offline. It includes what other members can see — their contact details, emergency contacts and emergency notes, and in the app their profile pictures and the photos of your hikes — and is kept for up to 24 days after it was last updated.
Changes you make while offline, until they can be sent.
Map areas you download for offline use in the app.
Logging out, or deleting your account, removes the copy of your hikes, its pictures and your downloaded maps from that device. If you use Pack Hiker on a shared computer, log out when you have finished. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or any third-party analytics.
We do count how many people use Pack Hiker each week, but we do it ourselves and from the two dates described in section 2 — nothing else. Those counts are kept as weekly totals that refer to no individual account. There is no analytics script, no tracking pixel, no advertising identifier, no session or behaviour recording, and no third party receives anything.
Our pages, scripts and fonts all come from our own server. Apart from the map tiles described in section 5, the website and app load nothing from another company, and our emails load nothing from the internet when you open them — their images travel inside the email.
9. Your rights
Under the Australian Privacy Act and the GDPR, you have the following rights:
Access: You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you by contacting us at the address in section 12.
Correction: You may update your name, email, phone number, and profile picture at any time through your Profile settings.
Deletion: You may delete your account at any time through Profile → Delete account. See section 7 for what is and is not deleted.
Portability: You may request an export of your personal data in a machine-readable format by contacting us at the address in section 12.
Objection / Restriction: You may object to or request restriction of processing in certain circumstances.
Withdraw consent: Where processing is based on consent, you may withdraw it at any time. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of prior processing.
Complaint: You may complain to us about how we have handled your personal information (see "Complaints" below) and, if you are not satisfied with our response, to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at www.oaic.gov.au. EU residents may also contact their national supervisory authority.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@packhiker.com. We will respond within 30 days.
To protect your information, before we act on a request we confirm it by writing to the email address on your account, and we only ever send your data to that address. If you don't have an account, we confirm it through the contact details we hold for you.
Complaints: If you think we have mishandled your personal information, email privacy@packhiker.com and tell us what happened. We will acknowledge your complaint promptly, look into it, and give you our response in writing within 30 days, telling you what we found and what we will do about it. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take your complaint to the OAIC at www.oaic.gov.au.
10. Information about people who don't have an account
Pack Hiker holds some information about people who have not signed up, because a member added it. This section is for them.
Emergency contacts: A member can list you as their emergency contact: your name, your relationship to them, your phone number and, optionally, your email address and notes. Before adding you, the member is asked to make sure you have agreed. Your details are visible to every member of that hike, appear in the safety briefs and check-in alerts members send, and are printed in the hike's PDF exports. If we have your email address, you may receive that member's safety brief — which may ask you to confirm you received it — and, if they do not check in after their hike, check-in alerts and the messages that follow them. Your details are deleted when the member removes you, leaves the hike or deletes their account, or when the hike is deleted.
People who are invited: When a member invites you to a hike, we keep your email address with the invitation and send you an invitation email. The invitation, and your address with it, is deleted 30 days after it was sent, whether or not you accepted.
Pack Shadows: A member can add someone without an account to a hike as a Pack Shadow, so the plan covers everyone walking: a name and, optionally, an email address, phone number, emergency contacts and PLB registrations. The member confirms they have that person's permission before adding their contact or emergency details. If a Pack Shadow later accepts an invitation, their details move into their own account.
Children: Accounts are for people aged 18 and over; if we learn that someone younger has created an account, we will delete it. A child can be part of a hike only as a Pack Shadow, added by their parent or guardian or with their permission.
If you are one of these people and want to see, correct or remove what we hold about you, email privacy@packhiker.com — you do not need an account. We may ask the member who added you to update their plans.
If you add someone else's details to Pack Hiker, you must first have their agreement to those details being shared as this policy describes.
11. Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be notified to registered users by email and/or by a prominent notice on the platform. Continued use of Pack Hiker after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy. The effective date at the top of this document will be updated with each revision.
12. Contact us
For any privacy-related questions, requests, or complaints, please contact us at:
privacy@packhiker.com