Built so we never see your family's data.
Switchback is built so we never see your family's data. There are no accounts and no logins. Your trips, plates, photos, journal entries, and routes live on your device. When a trip syncs to the rest of your family's phones, it is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves the device - we only ever hold scrambled data we can't read, and your family holds the keys. We don't show ads. We don't track you. We don't sell or share your data, because we can't read it.
The rest of this page is the long version of that paragraph.
Switchback is an iOS app for families on road trips. It's operated by the Switchback team, an independent developer. You can reach us anytime at [email protected].
Switchback doesn't ask you to create an account, sign in, or give us a name, email address, or phone number. The "crew" on a trip is just the first names your family types in on the device. Each person's identity is a random ID generated on the phone, not a user record on any server. Nothing you do in the app is tied to a developer-side identity, because there isn't one.
Everything you create in Switchback is stored locally on your device first - a full local copy, so nothing is ever lost:
If you never turn on syncing, this data never leaves your device at all.
When you invite the rest of your family to a trip, their phones need a copy of the trip so you can all play together. Before any of that data leaves your device, it's end-to-end encrypted using strong, standard encryption - with a per-trip key generated on your device. That key is shared only with the family members you invite, through the join flow. It's never sent to us in a form we can read.
To move the encrypted data between your family's phones, it travels over the internet through our systems and, when you're together with no signal, over a direct device-to-device link via Bluetooth or local Wi-Fi. In every case, the only thing that ever passes through our systems is ciphertext we have no way to open. We don't store, read, profile, sell, or share your trips - we can't. There's no advertising network, no analytics service, and no "AI partner" receiving your data. There is no partner.
You can turn syncing off at any time. The trip then stays on the device.
Location is off until you turn it on, and the app is fully usable without ever granting it.
If you turn on route recording for a trip, Switchback records your route at full precision while the trip is recording - on purpose, because a fuzzy, neighborhood-only line makes the keepsake-book map a useless scribble instead of the road you actually drove. That route is stored on your device and, like the rest of the trip, only ever leaves it end-to-end encrypted. We can't read where you've been.
Recording is bounded to a trip that's actively recording. A persistent indicator shows while it's on, and one tap stops it. "Off" means off. You can also skip location entirely and pick your region by hand.
Each of these is used only when you choose to use it:
Switchback is a family app intended to be set up by a parent. Our approach to children's privacy is the simplest one there is: we don't collect personal information from anyone, of any age. No accounts, no ads, no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs, no tracking, and no data sent to us in a form we can read. Because we collect nothing identifiable, there's nothing to handle differently for a child.
If you believe a child has somehow provided us personal information, contact us at [email protected] - though by design, we hold nothing tied to a person.
We don't use the device advertising identifier, we don't show the App Tracking Transparency prompt, and we don't fingerprint your device. Our App Privacy details on the App Store show Data Not Collected across every category, and no tracking anywhere.
You can export your trips - the keepsake logbook as a PDF, and your data as plain files - and you can delete everything in one tap from Settings. Deleting on your device removes your local copy. Because we hold only unreadable ciphertext and no account, there's no developer-side profile of you to separately request.
Switchback doesn't collect payment information. If a printed keepsake book is offered, it's sold through a print partner's own external checkout - that transaction happens on the partner's site, not in our app, and payment details never reach us. Any optional one-time app purchase is handled entirely by Apple; we never see or store your payment details.
If we change how the app handles data, we'll update this page and its "Last updated" date, and note material changes in the app or on the site.