Why Crossways asks to use your location in the background

The short answer

Crossways tells you when a friend is in the same city as you. You are almost never looking at your phone at the moment that becomes true — you are landing, or driving in, or arriving at a hotel. If the app could only check your location while you had it open, it would find out you were in the same city as a friend at some point after you next opened it, which is usually too late to be worth knowing.

So the app asks the operating system to wake it when your phone has travelled a significant distance. That is what “Always” or “Allow all the time” means, and it is the whole reason the permission is needed.

What actually happens when it wakes

1. Your phone wakes the app and hands it a position.
2. The app checks it on the device first, and usually stops there. A reading accurate only to within 5 km is too vague to place. One that implies you were moving faster than 200 km/h means you are in the air. One with no city near enough to name has nothing to report. One that puts you in the city you were last reported in, less than six hours ago, says nothing new. Each of those is dropped on the phone and nothing is sent.
3. If it looks like a new city, the app waits. It stores the city locally and does nothing until it sees you in the same place again at least 30 minutes later. A plane passing overhead is not an arrival, and this is what distinguishes the two.
4. Once it is confirmed, the app sends the position to our server, which works out the city and discards the position before the request finishes. What is kept is the city, and the coordinates of the centre of that city — not yours.
5. If a friend of yours is in the same city, both of you get a notification.

What is stored, and what is not

Stored: the cities you have been in, and when. Your exact position is never stored — not in our database, not in our server logs, not in crash reports. It exists only in memory, for as long as it takes to answer “which city is this?”

Not collected at all: your home address. The app decides on the device whether you are at home, and sends a yes or no. Where home is never leaves your phone, and there is nowhere on the server to put it.

Not continuous. The app does not follow you. It does not record a path, it has no idea which streets you drove down, and between one city and the next it sends nothing at all. On a normal day at home it sends nothing at all either.

What it is not used for

• Not sold, and not shared with data brokers or advertisers.
• Not used for advertising. The app contains no advertising SDKs.
• Not shared with anyone but the friends you have accepted.
• Not used to build a profile, a directory, or a feed. There is nowhere in Crossways to browse people, and nobody who is not already your friend can see you.

If you say no

You can use Crossways with location allowed only while the app is open. It will work when you open it and notice where you are then — so you can still see who is around by checking. What you lose is the part that makes the app worth having: nobody gets told you have arrived anywhere, including you.

You can change your mind in either direction at any time in your phone's settings. If you turn the permission off later, the app will tell you what has stopped working rather than carrying on and quietly finding nothing.

Turning it off without turning it off

There is a pause switch in the app's settings. It stops your location being reported at all while your account stays exactly as it is. Nobody is told that you paused, and the app never shows anyone the difference between a friend who paused and a friend who is simply not nearby.

More detail

The privacy policy covers everything else we store, who processes it, how long it is kept, and how to delete it.