PlainWay — last updated 2 October 2026
Related pages: our Terms of Use, and the consumer health data policies that Washington and Nevada law require to be published separately. If PlainWay routed you somewhere it should not have, please tell us about it.
PlainWay is operated by PlainWay LLC, an Ohio limited liability company.
| Postal address | 6545 Market Ave N Ste 100, Canton, OH 44721, United States |
|---|---|
| support@plainway.app |
PlainWay is currently offered in the United States only.
The app reads your device's location while it is open — to show where you are on the map and the speed limit there — and while you are navigating, to decide when to speak an instruction and to notice when you have left the route.
Your position is sent to our server in three situations, and only these:
In each case the position is used to answer that one request and is not stored afterwards. We keep no history of where anyone has been. The continuous record of positions while you drive stays on your phone (see "Trip logs" below).
The app asks for location permission "while using the app". It does not ask for access when the app is closed. While you are navigating, location continues with the screen locked or another app in front, because that is most of a drive — iOS shows its own indicator whenever this happens. When the drive ends, background location stops.
When you type a destination, what you type is sent to our server so it can be looked up, together with your position as described above. Section 4 says which outside services see a search and what they are given.
You can type a person's name to drive to the address on their contact card. This is off until you tap "Search contacts" in the search suggestions. iOS then asks whether PlainWay may use your contacts: all of them, only the ones you choose, or none. You can change that at any time in the iPhone's Settings. If you never tap it, you are never asked.
Your contacts are searched on your phone. Names, phone numbers and the contact list itself are never sent to us or to anyone else. When you choose a contact, that one postal address is sent to our server to be found on the map — exactly as if you had typed the address yourself, and handled the same way: used to answer the request, then discarded.
PlainWay asks once, before your first trip, what you are driving. If you choose anything larger than a car, the app records the type together with the height, width, length, weight and axle count you confirmed.
That setting is stored on your phone, and it is sent to our server with each route request. The server uses it to calculate routes with the restrictions described in section 1 of the Terms of Use — which is where what the feature does, and does not do, is set out. Like your position, it is used to answer that request and is not stored afterwards, and it is not used for anything else.
If you leave the setting on Car, the request carries only that.
Like every service on the internet, our server sees the network (IP) address each request comes from. It is needed to send the answer back. Only a shortened form is written to our logs (section 5).
The app records a diagnostic log of each trip — positions, spoken instructions, recalculations, and the vehicle you had set — so that problems can be understood after the fact rather than from memory. This log is kept on your phone. It is replaced when you start a new trip, and does not survive the app being quit. It is sent to us only if you deliberately choose to export it and send it. If you do, we use it to diagnose that problem and delete it when we are done.
A trip log contains the route you actually drove. Please don't send us one for a journey you would rather not disclose — send a log from a different trip instead.
If you write to us — for support, a privacy request, or to report a map problem — we receive your email address and whatever you include. Map-problem reports are also recorded in our safety log: where the problem is, what was reported, when, and what we did about it. Your email address is not copied into that log. Section 7 says how long each is kept.
None of what we receive is attached to a name, an account or a device or advertising identifier. That makes it very hard for us to connect a request to a particular person — but a position is personal information in its own right, and we treat it that way rather than calling it anonymous.
PlainWay is not currently offered in the UK or the European Economic Area. This section applies if you use it there anyway. Where the table says "performance of a contract", the contract is our Terms of Use, which you accept before your first trip.
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Location for routing, search and speed limits | To calculate and follow a route, find a place, and show the limit where you are | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Destination searches | To find the place you are looking for | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Your vehicle type and dimensions | To route you with your vehicle's restrictions | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) |
| Server logs (see section 5) | To keep the service running and secure | Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f) |
| Emails, trip logs and reports you send us | To answer you, and to keep a record of safety reports | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b); legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f) for the safety record |
| Crash reports from Apple (see section 4) | To fix the fault that caused the crash | Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f), and only where you have enabled diagnostic sharing on your device |
Providing navigation means a small number of other services see some of this data. We use as few as we can, and we give each one no more than it needs.
| Service | What it sees | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH (server in Helsinki, Finland) | Everything sent to our server | They host it |
| Photon, operated by Komoot GmbH (Germany) | What you type in a search, and your position rounded to about a kilometre. The same rounded position is also used to work out which country you are in, so the right speed-limit units are used | Address and place search against OpenStreetMap data |
| United States Census Bureau | What you type, but only when it names a house number that Photon could not place; and, if the state is not otherwise clear, your position rounded to about a kilometre | Finding street addresses that OpenStreetMap does not record. It is a US Government service and is not told who you are |
| Overture Maps — no data leaves our server | Nothing. The place data is a file we hold ourselves | Finding businesses by name. Searching for a shop sends your search to nobody else |
| OpenFreeMap | Your device's network address and which map tiles it loads — which shows the area of the map you are looking at, usually where you are. Your phone fetches these directly; they do not pass through our server | Drawing the map |
| Apple | Purchase and download records; crash reports, if you have turned those on | They distribute the app, and pass on crashes so they can be fixed |
| Our email provider | Emails you send us, and anything attached | So we can read and answer them |
We do not control how long Photon, the Census Bureau or OpenFreeMap keep what they receive; their own privacy policies govern that. That is the reason positions sent to Photon and the Census Bureau are rounded before they leave our server.
About those crash reports. If a version of PlainWay crashes on your phone, Apple may show us a report of what went wrong — but only if you have chosen to share diagnostics with app developers in your iPhone's settings, under Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. The report describes which part of our code failed, along with your device model and iOS version. It does not contain your name, your route, or anything you typed. You can turn it off at any time in that same screen, and we never see it if you do.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — as those terms are defined under California law. We have never done so.
Our server keeps ordinary technical logs of the requests made to it. A log line records which address on the server was called, whether it succeeded, how long it took, and a shortened form of the network address the request came from — the last part of the address is removed, so it identifies a network rather than a device.
What you searched for and your position are removed before the line is written, so neither is ever stored. The same is true of the diagnostic messages our server records when something fails: they note what failed and why, never what you were looking for or where you were.
These logs exist so that faults and abuse can be investigated. They are kept for about a week. They are not used to build a profile of anyone and are not combined with anything else.
Our server is in Helsinki, Finland, so a route, search or speed-limit request is answered there. PlainWay LLC is run from the United States, and we look after the server, its logs and our email from there. The other services in section 4 each handle what they receive in their own locations; the Census Bureau and Apple are in the United States, and Komoot is a German company.
| Position, destination and vehicle sent with a request | Used to answer the request, then discarded |
|---|---|
| Search text | Used to answer the request, then discarded |
| Trip log on your phone | Until you start another trip or quit the app |
| A trip log you send us | Until the problem it was sent about is resolved, then deleted |
| Server logs | About a week, then deleted automatically. They contain no search text, no positions and no full network address |
| Emails you send us | As long as we need them to deal with what you asked. Ask us to delete yours and we will, unless we must keep it because of a legal claim |
| Safety log of map-problem reports | For as long as PlainWay operates. It is our record of what we were told and what we did, and it contains no email addresses |
| Crash reports | Held by Apple in their developer tools for as long as Apple keeps them. We do not copy them anywhere else |
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, to receive it in a portable form, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.
Write to support@plainway.app and we will answer within the time the law allows — 45 days under California law and most other US state laws, one month under UK/EU GDPR.
In practice, the honest answer to most such requests will be that we hold nothing about you. There is no account to look up. Because the app has no sign-in, we usually have no way of connecting any record to a particular person, and we will not ask you for additional identifying information purely to create that link. Emails you have sent us are the exception, and we can find and delete those.
If we decline a request, you can appeal by replying to our answer. If you are in the UK or EEA and you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national supervisory authority.
Some browsers and devices can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no agreed standard for what one means, and we do not respond to them differently — because there is nothing for them to switch off. PlainWay does not track you across other apps or websites, and never has.
PlainWay is a driving application and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, write to us and we will delete it.
Traffic between the app and our server is encrypted in transit. The strongest protection, though, is that there is very little to protect: no accounts, no passwords, no stored history of where anyone has been. Data that is never kept cannot be exposed.
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top. Material changes will be brought to your attention in the app, which will ask you to accept the new version before it routes you again.
2 October 2026: Added optional contact search: type a name to drive to the address on that contact's card. Contacts are searched on your phone; only the address you choose is sent, as a search.
24 September 2026: Google Places, which a previous version listed as a search service, has been removed from PlainWay entirely. Positions sent to Photon and the Census Bureau are now rounded to about a kilometre, and your position is no longer written to our server logs. The speed-limit display when you are not navigating is described.
PlainWay LLC
6545 Market Ave N Ste 100
Canton, OH 44721
United States
support@plainway.app
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