Privacy Policy
We aim to keep this privacy policy as clear, concise, and easy to understand as possible. We are committed to being transparent and open. This article explains generally how we receive information about you, and what we do with that information once we have it.
Your data is yours
Members on Hitchwiki Maps can view their profile information on Hitchwiki Maps.
You are always able to remove personal information from your profile.
You are able to remove your profile from Hitchwiki Maps by asking us to delete your account.
We will never, ever sell your profile data to anyone or try to otherwise use it commercially.
Information about you
This information is collected when you provide it to us (like when you fill your profile) or use features of our service (like editing the map).
- Basic profile information such as name, email, language, picture, gender, age, living location, usernames in other networks.
- Information about your hitchhiking experiences.
Our server
Our server (and thus your data) is securely hosted in the EU.
Public publication of ride data (important — please read)
The hitchhiking experiences you submit are published publicly alongside personal information — including the username you choose to publish under, start and destination coordinates, waiting time, rating, and any comment you write. Specifically:
- Rides are published to the Nostr protocol, a decentralized network of relays operated by third parties. Once an event is on Nostr, copies may be stored on relays we do not control.
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The same data is made available on this website and is also offered as a structured
data export (e.g. JSON/CSV files such as
allPosts.json/allPosts.csvand the database dump), so that researchers and other projects can re-use it.
By submitting a ride you consent to this public, world-readable publication and to its re-use by third parties (including in structured form that makes copying and aggregation easy).
Licensing of what you submit: The overall database is made available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0. The individual review you write — your free-text comment and the username you publish under — is your own contribution, and by submitting it you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This means anyone may re-use your comment and username as long as they credit you and share alike. Please do not submit text you are not willing to publish under this license. See our Copyright and License page for details.
Why we publish this data: We make ride data openly available so that it can benefit the whole hitchhiking community — for example, by helping other hitchhikers find good spots, by enabling other hitchhiking projects and apps to build on the same shared dataset, and by supporting academic and independent research into hitchhiking and mobility more broadly. Public, structured publication is what makes this re-use possible.
Risks you should be aware of before submitting:
- We do not know who downloads, copies, or re-publishes the data. The set of downstream re-users is open-ended.
- Because of this, if you later withdraw your consent, ask us to delete your account, or invoke your “right to be forgotten”, we can only remove the data from our own systems and best-effort request deletion from the Nostr relays we publish to. We cannot guarantee deletion from copies held by third parties, archives, mirrors, or other Nostr relays.
- Providing the data in a structured file format does not create new categories of risk, but it does increase the existing risk by making large-scale copying and reprocessing easier.
- Coordinates of rides (start and destination) can in some cases reveal places you regularly visit (e.g. your home or workplace). Please consider this before submitting precise locations.
If you do not want your data to be subject to these risks, please do not submit rides, or submit them under a pseudonym that is not linkable to your real identity.
Research
Hitchhiking and more broadly mobility research might be conducted using the data collected on Hitchwiki Maps including user data. See our statistics page for more information.