Opting out of the new Track Heatmap

A few days ago we announced our new Track Heatmap which is currently only available to supporters. You can read more about it in this forum post but here's a screen shot to give you an idea of what it looks like. Essentially each red line is a track¹ which was uploaded to our GPS mapping app.

A couple of users have asked whether their uploaded tracks can be removed from the heatmap.

One cited the GDPR so before I explain how to remove your tracks some thoughts on the GDPR aspects. Your tracks as shown do not identify you: all everyone can see is that someone went from location A to location B. Even if location A or B is your house it doesn't really help identify you as there's nothing to connect the track with any other piece of data. To give you an example quite a few tracks on the heatmap start from our house, but that won't help you find our address as you don't know which tracks are ours.

Having said that this is of course your personal data and we respect your use of it so you have two options if you don't want one or more of your tracks to appear:

1. Go into the "Your GPX uploads" option in the app menu and delete the tracks you want excluded.

2. Ask us to exclude all your tracks from our heatmap

In either case your tracks will disappear from the heatmap when we next do a tile build, and that will happen fairly frequently, however if you choose option 2 then, as you're not contributing to the common good of the Track Heatmap, you will not be able to view the heatmap at all from then on.

Finally I should mention that if you've uploaded tracks without being logged in then there is no way for us to identify which are your tracks so they are not personal data in GDPR terms and they cannot be deleted.

1. A track records where you have been and when you were there. For more information click here.