Privacy policy
Last updated 26 September 2026 · applies to the OBDTrip iOS application and obdtrip.com
The short version. OBDTrip records your journeys on your iPhone and keeps them there. There is no account. Your routes, your VIN and your journey times are never transmitted to us in any form unless you deliberately share a trip by link. Two things can reach our server on their own, and you control both: coarse diagnostics that tell us the app was opened and what went wrong, which are on unless you turn them off; and detailed vehicle readings for comparing your car against others, which are off unless you turn them on, for a period you choose. A trip you share by link carries only what you choose to include, and stops existing when the link ends.
1. Who is responsible
OBDTrip is published by Impossible Possible. If you have a question about this policy or about data the application holds, write to privacy@obdtrip.com.
2. What the application records, and where it lives
When you drive, OBDTrip records information from three sources: your vehicle's diagnostic port, your iPhone's location services, and your iPhone's motion sensors. All of it is written to storage on your device.
| Category | Examples | Where it is held |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle identity | VIN, protocol, supported readings, name and photo you give it | Your device; your private iCloud if you enable syncing |
| Journey record | Route, start and end times, distance, duration | Your device; your private iCloud if you enable syncing |
| Engine telemetry | Speed, engine speed, temperatures, load, fuel trim, fault codes | Your device; your private iCloud if you enable syncing |
| Motion | Acceleration, braking and cornering measured by the phone | Your device; your private iCloud if you enable syncing |
| Diagnostics | Connection log showing whether the adapter is working | Your device only; discarded as it ages |
None of this is sent to Impossible Possible as recorded. There is no server-side copy of your trips — no routes, no journey times, nothing with your vehicle's identity on it — for us to look at, hand over or lose. Section 6 sets out the two narrow things that are sent, and how each of them is controlled.
3. iCloud
If you enable syncing, OBDTrip stores your data in your own private iCloud database using Apple's CloudKit. This is the same private container model that holds your Notes and your Photos. Impossible Possible has no access to it: we cannot read your records, list them, or recover them for you. Apple's handling of that data is governed by Apple's privacy policy.
Syncing is optional. With it switched off, everything stays on the single device that recorded it.
4. Location
OBDTrip asks for location access so a journey can be drawn as a route. Location is sampled only while the application believes you are with a configured vehicle, at the least precise setting that still produces a usable route, and it stops when the drive does.
Location never leaves your devices unless you share a trip and choose to include its map. The application does not otherwise transmit it in any form — not exact, not rounded, not reduced to a region. It plays no part in the telemetry described below, at either level. Sharing a trip is described in section 6a.
One thing that is true of every website and every app, and which we would rather state than leave implied: when your phone contacts our server, the connection itself carries your IP address, and Cloudflare — which operates the network our server runs on — derives an approximate country and data-centre location from it in the ordinary course of routing and protecting traffic. We keep that alongside the request record for a short period, because a request log without it cannot be used to diagnose a routing or abuse problem. It is not derived from your phone's location services, it is far coarser than a location, and it is not attached to your driving data.
5. No account, no tracking
- OBDTrip has no sign-up, no username, no password and no email address on file.
- It contains no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK and no third-party tracker of any kind. The diagnostics described in section 6 go to our own server and nowhere else, and are not shared with anybody.
- It does not use the advertising identifier, and does not ask for tracking permission.
- Nothing is sold, shared, licensed or brokered. There is no commercial second party.
Purchases, if you make one, are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. We receive Apple's aggregate sales reporting; we do not receive your payment details.
6. Telemetry: what the application sends, and when
Apart from a trip you share yourself (section 6a), there are exactly two circumstances in which OBDTrip sends anything to a server we operate, and they are separate settings because they are genuinely different requests. Both are in Settings → Telemetry & fleet comparison, and both can be changed at any time.
Essential diagnostics — on unless you turn it off
This is what makes the application supportable. Without it, a crash on your phone is something we never learn about and therefore never fix.
- That the application was opened, and whether the previous launch finished starting up.
- That a drive started and finished, with its duration and a handful of summary figures.
- Roughly how much is stored on this phone — how many vehicles, how many drives, and storage rounded to the nearest fifty megabytes.
- The application version, the iOS version and the general device family — "iPhone", not a model.
- Fault reports when something goes wrong, so it can be fixed.
- Summaries of the crash, hang and performance reports iOS gives the application: what kind of problem it was, an error code or a duration, and the app and iOS versions. The full reports stay on your iPhone unless you choose to share one with us from Settings → Diagnostics.
Each installation enrols with the service whether or not this is switched on, because an application that cannot reach the server cannot tell us it has crashed. Enrolment establishes a credential proving the request comes from a genuine, unmodified copy of the application on real Apple hardware. It proves the software. It says nothing about the person.
Extended telemetry — off unless you turn it on
Some questions cannot be answered from one car alone — "is this coolant range normal for an engine like mine?", "do other people's intake temperatures behave like this in summer?". Answering them properly needs detailed readings from many vehicles, so extended telemetry sends second-by-second measurements from your vehicle's diagnostic port, and unlocks the extended insights in return.
You are shown what it means before it is switched on, and you choose how long it stays on: a day, a week, a month, or until you turn it off. A period you choose ends on its own — nothing has to run and nothing has to be remembered.
What switching it off does, stated plainly. It stops any further collection immediately, discards anything packed but not yet sent, and stops the extended insights. It does not retract readings already contributed: those have been folded into averages describing thousands of vehicles and cannot be picked back out. That sentence appears in the application before you agree to anything, not only here.
What is sent, at either level
- Derived measurements — a maximum, a minimum, an average, or a detailed series if extended is on.
- A cohort: a coarse grouping such as engine family and model-year band, computed on your phone from non-unique attributes. Groups are deliberately broad enough to contain many vehicles. The only thing derived from your VIN is its first three characters, which identify a manufacturer and a region and are shared by tens of thousands of cars.
- Coarse application context: the app version, the iOS version, the general device family.
- Fault and anomaly reports, when something goes wrong.
What is never sent
- Your VIN, registration, or any identifier unique to your vehicle.
- Location of any kind, at any precision.
- Routes, or journey times finer than the hour they fell in. A drive is described by how long it lasted and how its readings are spaced relative to each other, never by when you were anywhere.
- Any name, photo or label you have given a vehicle.
- Any personal identifier. There is no account behind the data, and no identifier that could be connected to you, to an Apple ID or to a payment. Each installation does hold a random identifier so the server can recognise a repeated upload — it names an installation and nothing else, and a fresh install of the app generates a new one rather than inheriting the old.
The server enforces this rather than trusting the app: attributes whose names or values look like identifying data are rejected at the boundary and raised as a fault for review.
How the results are protected
- Group threshold. An aggregate is only released once enough separate vehicles sit behind it. Below that threshold the application is told the figure is suppressed, and no counts are given either.
- Comparison happens on your phone. The server publishes what is typical for a group. Your device decides privately whether your car sits outside it. The server is never told the answer.
- Contributions are separated from you. Your device authenticates using Apple's App Attest, which proves the request comes from a genuine, unmodified copy of the app on real Apple hardware. It carries no identity of yours, and we cannot connect it to an Apple ID, a payment or a person.
6a. Sharing a trip by link
You can send one trip to somebody as a link. Nothing is shared until you choose a trip, choose what goes with it and press Share. The trip is then uploaded to obdtrip.com so that whoever holds the link can open it, in a browser or in the app.
- What travels is what you leave switched on: the trip's name, when it happened (to the minute), its summary figures, the readings and moments you pick, laps, and optionally fault codes. The route travels only if you choose to include it: either as an outline with no coordinates in it, or as a map, which does carry the route's positions.
- What never travels: your VIN, the vehicle's photo, any other trip, or anything you switched off. A shared trip carries no free text of yours beyond the trip's name.
- Who can see it: anyone holding the link. It is not listed, indexed or searchable. We count how many times it has been opened so the app can tell you, and nothing about who opened it.
- How long it lasts: for the period you choose, at most 180 days. You can take it down sooner from the app at any time, which deletes it from the server there and then. One that simply runs out is deleted at the next hourly sweep.
7. Security
- All communication with obdtrip.com uses TLS, and the application refuses anything else.
- Every request the application makes is signed by a key held in your iPhone's Secure Enclave, so it cannot be forged or altered in transit, and cannot be replayed.
- Every response the server returns is signed with a key the application checks against one built into it. A response that did not come from this service is discarded rather than acted on.
- Data on your device is protected by iOS file encryption, tied to your device passcode.
8. How long things are kept
Your journey history is yours and is kept until you delete it. Where a trip's detailed telemetry has been safely copied to your iCloud, the app may remove the local copy after a week to save space, and fetches it back on demand — the record itself is not lost.
On the server:
- Aggregated group statistics, which describe a population of vehicles and no individual one, are kept indefinitely. They are the point of the exercise, and once a reading is part of an average over thousands of vehicles it cannot be separated back out.
- Individual contributed measurements are kept for as long as they are useful to the aggregates built from them. We are not going to name a deletion period we might not keep to. What we will say is what they are: coarse figures under a broad cohort, with no vehicle or personal identity attached, which is why holding them is not a risk to you.
- Raw uploads of detailed readings are held only until they have been processed into those aggregates, plus a short window in case the processing has to be repeated.
- Request logs used to diagnose faults are deleted after 14 days.
- A trip you shared by link is deleted when the link expires or you take it down.
9. Your choices and rights
- Stop contributing: switch either level off in Settings → Telemetry & fleet comparison. Nothing further is collected or sent, and anything queued but unsent is discarded. Readings already folded into the group averages stay there — see section 6.
- Erase everything locally: Settings offers a full deletion of trips, vehicles and cached data, including removal from your iCloud.
- Erase everything by deleting the app: removing OBDTrip removes its on-device data with it.
- Ask us: write to privacy@obdtrip.com for access, correction or erasure of anything held on our side.
If you are in the UK or the EU, you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection under the UK GDPR and GDPR respectively, and the right to complain to your supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. In practice we hold very little that could be about you: no account, no identifier, no location.
10. Children
OBDTrip is not designed for or directed at children, and knowingly collects nothing from them.
11. This website
obdtrip.com serves static pages. It sets no cookies, embeds no third-party scripts and runs no analytics. Cloudflare, which hosts it, processes request metadata such as IP address in the normal course of serving and protecting a website; see Cloudflare's privacy policy.
12. Changes
If this policy changes materially — particularly if anything new would be transmitted — the date at the top changes and the application tells you before the change takes effect. Turning something on for you without asking is not something we will do.