On-mountain only.

What we share, when

• On the mountain: the granularity you’ve picked (full GPS, resort region, or current lift) is visible to other HotLaps users at the same resort.
• Off the mountain: nothing. Your last on-mountain ping ages out within 10 minutes and you disappear from nearby maps. No background tracking, no “heading home” status, no last-seen timestamp persists.
• Always: your handle, display name, and meetups you host or RSVP to are visible to other users at the same resort while a meetup is active.

How the geofence works

Each supported resort has a polygon boundary derived from OpenStreetMap ski-area data. Before any presence ping is accepted by our backend, we check the coordinates against every resort polygon. If you’re not inside one, the ping is rejected — you stay invisible.

We do not store off-mountain coordinates server-side, ever. The check is the storage point.

You control the granularity

Three settings, your choice, change anytime:

• Full — exact GPS pin on the resort map.
• Region — coarse area like “north peak”. Default.
• Lift — just the chairlift you’re at.

Whichever you pick, the fields you didn’t opt to share are never written to our database — not blanked on read, not stored encrypted, just not written.

What we don't do

• No friend graph — no contact import, no “people you may know”.
• No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics that touch location.
• No selling, sharing, or monetizing your data.
• No retention of off-mountain location, ever.

Data we do keep

Account info (handle, display name, hashed password), the meetups you create or RSVP to, and the most-recent on-mountain presence ping (overwritten on every heartbeat, expires after 10 minutes of inactivity).

Account deletion

From the iOS app: Settings → Delete account. We remove your user row, sessions, presence, and meetup history within 24 hours.