Where your data actually goes

Someone asked me this on social media yesterday:

How does traffic data work if you're using TomTom as the base service? Do the locations of Canadians get shared with TomTom to participate in that? Your website says that our data will be kept on Canadian soil.

That is a fair question and it deserves a real answer rather than a slogan. It also caught something. Our home page said your data was "kept on Canadian soil", and that was a looser claim than the truth. I have changed it, and this article is the long version of why.

The short answer on traffic

TomTom builds its traffic picture from its own network of sources: commercial vehicle fleets, connected cars, and apps that license their software kit and send data back. Maple Maps is not one of those. We read their traffic layer and draw it on your screen. We do not feed it.

Your driving is not in TomTom's traffic data. There is no code in the app that uploads where you have been, to them or to us, and there never has been.

What we keep, and where

Everything we store runs on servers in Montréal. That part of the claim was always true.

What we store is less than most people assume. There is no account, so there is no profile. Your saved places, your home and work, your recent searches and every setting live on your phone and are never uploaded. If you delete the app they are gone, and I could not retrieve them for you if you asked.

On our own server there is a beta sign-up list, which is your email address and the language you chose. There is a table for business owners who claim their listing. And there is a daily counter that I will come back to.

That is the lot. There is no history of where you have been, because we do not create one.

What leaves the country, and why

Three things reach TomTom. I want to be precise about each, because "the app talks to a map provider" can mean anything.

The start and end of a route. When you ask for directions, those two coordinates are the request. There is no way to compute a route from Kamloops to Kelowna without telling the router where Kamloops and Kelowna are. Those coordinates travel from your phone to our server in Montréal, and our server asks TomTom. TomTom sees the request coming from us, not from you, and never sees your phone or its address.

What you typed in the search box, and roughly where you are. Same reason. A search for "coffee" is useless without somewhere to search near. Also sent through Montréal.

Map and traffic tiles. This is the gap. Today your phone fetches the map images and the traffic layer straight from TomTom, which means their servers see your phone's IP address and which squares of the map you asked for. This is the ordinary way every map app on your phone works, and it is still the weakest part of our story, because it is the one place where a request goes out with your name on it, so to speak, rather than ours.

I am moving those requests behind our own server so that stops being true. It is a real piece of work rather than a switch, and I would rather tell you it is on the list than pretend it is done.

The daily count, in full

Once a day, if you have not switched it off, the app tells our server that this phone opened Maple Maps. That is the entire message.

It carries a random identifier that your phone made up when you installed the app. Not your name, not your phone number, not the device serial, and nothing issued by Apple or Google. We store it only as a one-way hash, so what is in the database cannot be turned back into what your phone sent. It carries no location, no searches, and no time beyond the date.

I keep it because it is the only way to know whether people come back, and that is the difference between a project worth continuing and a hobby I am fooling myself about. It is a switch in Settings called "Count me as a user", and turning it off costs you nothing.

Why TomTom at all

Because they are Dutch, not American, and that was the whole point of starting this. Because their data is good. Because their developer terms let one person in Edmonton build on top of them without handing over the people who use it. And because when I started this a week ago, the alternative was months of work before anyone could drive anywhere.

Their data is not perfect, especially in rural Canada, and you have all been generous about telling me so. I file every one of those reports.

What I am still deciding

The honest position is that Maple Maps is Canadian in the ways that are within my control, and depends on a European company for the map itself. I could go further. Routing can be run on our own servers using open data. Addresses can come from a Canadian government dataset. Closures and construction can come from the provinces, who publish them openly and know them better than anyone.

The one thing that cannot be built from Canadian data alone is live traffic, and not for want of trying. Traffic comes from watching where a lot of vehicles actually are and how fast they are moving. The only way to build that in-house is to watch you, which is the one thing I have promised not to do.

That leaves a real trade-off, and it is not mine to make alone. Live traffic is not just the red and orange colouring on the roads. It decides which route the app hands you and whether the arrival time it shows you is honest. Losing it would make the app worse in a way you would notice on a Monday morning.

So I am asking. The beta survey now has questions about exactly this: whether you want everything on Canadian ground even if some features get worse, how much you lean on traffic, and what you would give up to keep it here.

It also asks about money, because the two questions are the same question. There will not be a free version of Maple Maps. There is no way to run this for nothing, and I will not cover it by selling anything of yours. The shape I can see working is two paid tiers: a Canadian one at around two dollars a month with no live traffic, and a more expensive one that adds traffic from an outside provider. That is a guess, not a decision, which is why it is in the survey and not in an announcement.

The survey is here. Seventeen questions, anonymous, on our own server, and only the first few are required.

If you want to check my work

The privacy policy now spells out each of the things above in the shorter form a policy should be. If something in it does not match what I have written here, that is a mistake and I want to know.

And if you spot the next thing our own words are papering over, tell me the way this person did. Getting the question in public was better than not getting it.

Mathieu