What RoadThread knows about you.

The short version

There is no account to create and no profile to build. Your trips, vehicles and saved preferences are stored in a database on your own device. When you describe a trip in your own words, that sentence is sent to our server and forwarded to Anthropic so it can be turned into structured trip details. If you choose to, you can also photograph a page of plans you already have and have it read. Place names and points along your route go to Mapbox to be turned into positions and directions. Nothing about your trips is stored on our servers.

What stays on your phone

All of it, unless this page says otherwise. Trips, routes, saved vehicles, travel preferences, and the original wording of every request are held in a local database on your device. RoadThread has no cloud sync, so this data is not backed up by us and is not readable by us. If you delete the app, it is gone.

What leaves your phone, and when

The words you type or speak to describe a trip. When you ask RoadThread to plan or change a trip, the text you wrote is sent over an encrypted connection to our service, which forwards it to Anthropic’s API to interpret. Anthropic returns structured details — origin, destination, roads, daily driving limits — and our service passes them straight back to your phone.

This happens only when you actively ask for a plan or a correction. It does not happen in the background.

Please bear in mind that this text is whatever you chose to write. If you describe a trip as starting at your home address, that address is part of the request.

Places and route points, to Mapbox. Turning “Stowe, Vermont” into a position, and working out the driving route between two points, is done by Mapbox. Place names and coordinates along your route are sent to them directly from the app, under their privacy policy. This is how the map and the mileage work.

A photograph or a PDF of your plans, only if you choose one. See Photographs and documents below.

The places and roads on your trip, when you ask RoadThread to look something up. RoadThread can go and read published pages for you — what is worth stopping for, what a road is like for a large vehicle, whether a road is closed, and where an RV can empty its tanks or fill its water. To do that, our service runs web searches that contain the names of the roads and towns on your trip, the dates of the trip, and a short description of what you are driving — for example “a 20-foot camper van, 10 ft 2 in tall, carrying propane”. Those searches reach Anthropic and, through it, the public web.

This happens only when you ask for it by tapping to look something up, never in the background. Your name is not part of it, and neither is your device key.

A short description of your vehicle. Drawn from the vehicle you saved, in words rather than as a record — its rough size, height, and whether it carries propane — because that is what decides whether a warning on a DOT page applies to you.

Nothing else. RoadThread does not transmit your trip history or your contacts, and it does not upload your saved vehicles as records. It does not read your photo library — only the single file you choose, if you choose one. If you use your current location as a starting point, it is resolved on your device into a place name, and those coordinates are not sent to our servers.

What we keep

Nothing about your trips. Our service is stateless: it holds a request only for as long as it takes to answer it, and writes no trip database. We do not keep a copy of what you asked for, and we cannot retrieve your past trips.

Our hosting provider keeps ordinary operational logs, which record that a request happened and whether it succeeded. Those logs do not contain the text of your request.

Anthropic

Anthropic processes your trip description — and a photograph or PDF, if you have one read — on our behalf so it can be interpreted. It also carries out the web searches described above, when you ask RoadThread to look something up. We send only that content: no name, no account, and not the device key described below.

Anthropic may retain what we send for a period under their own commercial terms, and we do not control that retention. Please do not write anything into a trip description, or photograph a page, that you would not want a third-party AI service to process.

Location

RoadThread can start a trip from where you are, so you do not have to type your own address. This is optional and off until you choose it — your device asks first, and declining costs you nothing but a little typing.

Your location is used on your device and is not sent to our servers. It becomes the starting point of a trip you are describing, the same as if you had typed the town name. We do not store a location history, we do not track you between sessions, and nothing about where you are leaves the app except as part of a trip request you chose to make.

RoadThread does not use location in the background. It is read once, when you tap to use it.

Turn-by-turn navigation is not in this release. When it arrives it will need continuous location while you are driving, and this page will be updated before that version ships.

Photographs and documents

If you already have your trip written down — a printed itinerary, a note, a page of a guidebook — you can photograph it and RoadThread will read the details off it instead of you typing them. You can also choose a PDF of a plan, which is handled the same way: sent, read, and discarded.

Only the one file you choose is sent. RoadThread does not browse or scan your photo library or your documents, and nothing else in either is looked at. The file is sent to our service and forwarded to Anthropic to be read.

It is not kept. Our service holds the image in memory for the length of that single request and then discards it. It is never written to disk, never written to a log, and never cached. What comes back is text, which is then treated exactly like text you typed.

We ask the model to leave behind anything on the page that is not about the trip — confirmation numbers, prices, card details, phone numbers and other people’s information. That instruction reduces what is read out; it does not change what you sent. A photograph may show more than you intended, so photograph a page you are comfortable sending, and note that Anthropic’s retention applies to it as it does to text.

The location a photo carries does not go with it. A picture taken on a phone normally carries hidden information about where and when it was taken. RoadThread re-encodes the picture before sending it, which leaves that behind — so photographing your plans at home does not tell us, or anyone else, that you were at home.

The camera and photo library are used only at the moment you tap to take or choose a picture. Neither is used in the background.

The device key

So that we can count how much the service is being used and stop abuse of it, the app asks our server for a random key the first time it needs one, keeps it, and sends it with each request.

It is 32 random bytes and nothing else: not an account, not your email, not an advertising identifier, and not derived from anything about your phone or about you. There is nothing in it that can be matched to you, or to anything you use elsewhere. Our server stores only a one-way hash of it alongside a count of requests for the current day, and that count is discarded when the day turns.

It is not sent to Anthropic or to Mapbox. Deleting the app forgets it, and a fresh install is simply a new device.

Microphone and speech

You can describe a trip by speaking instead of typing. Speech is converted to text using your device’s own speech recognition. Depending on your device and settings, Apple may process that audio to perform the recognition — that is a system service, governed by Apple’s privacy policy.

RoadThread never records or stores audio. No recording is written to disk, and no audio is sent to our servers. Only the resulting text is used, and only in the same way as text you typed. The microphone is used solely while you are actively dictating.

Crash reports

RoadThread sends crash and error reports to Sentry, a third-party diagnostics service, so that faults can be found and fixed. These reports are deliberately stripped:

• No account or user identity — there isn’t one
• Request bodies are removed, so the text of your trip description is never included
• Screen names are recorded, but identifiers and search terms are replaced with [redacted] — a report says you were on a trip screen, never which trip or which places
• No screenshots, no screen recording, no view hierarchy
• Console output is dropped entirely

The intent is that a crash report tells us where in the app something broke, and never where on earth you were going. The rules that enforce this are covered by automated tests that run on every change.

What RoadThread does not do

• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers
• No analytics or behavioural tracking
• No selling or sharing of personal information
• No accounts, logins, or email lists
• No third-party trackers of any kind

Children

RoadThread is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since the app has no accounts and collects no identity, it does not build a profile of any user.

Your choices

Because your data lives on your device, you control it directly. Deleting a trip removes it. Deleting the app removes everything. There is no account to close and no server-side copy to request or erase.

If you would prefer not to send any trip text off your device, do not use the trip-planning request, and do not have a document read; the rest of the app continues to work.

Changes

RoadThread is in active development. When what the app does with data changes — particularly when navigation and location arrive — this page will be updated before that version is released, and the date at the top will change.

Contact

Questions about privacy in RoadThread:
privacy@firstlightapps.com

FirstLight Technologies, Inc.