Boatie Privacy Policy
Last updated: 14 October 2026
There's no Boatie account and no servers of ours holding your stuff. Your trips, spots, boat details and photos live on your iPhone, and in your own iCloud if you have it turned on. We can't see any of it. There are no ads, no analytics and no tracking, and we don't sell or share your data. The main thing that leaves your phone is the location of your home water, sent to our weather provider so you get a forecast.
Boatie is made by Kyle Imeson ("we", "us") in New Zealand. This policy covers the Boatie iPhone app.
What Boatie keeps on your phone
- Your home water, home ramp and region.
- Trips you record, with the GPS track, distance and time.
- Spots you save.
- Your boat details, like name, make, length, rego, insurance date and engine hours.
- Gear, maintenance, jobs and reminders.
- Photos you add of your gear or catch, plus catch notes and where you caught it.
- Your trip plan: who's watching for you and their phone number, who's on board and when you're due back.
- Your last known position, so the Emergency screen still has something to show when you've got no signal.
- A copy of the latest forecast, so the app keeps working offline.
- Your settings, like your theme.
You can change or delete any of this in the app.
iCloud backup
If you're signed in to iCloud, Boatie backs up your data and gear photos to your own private iCloud storage using Apple's CloudKit. That space belongs to your Apple Account, so we can't open it, read it or delete it. Apple looks after it under Apple's privacy policy.
The backup covers everything above except your trip plan and the forecast copy, which stay on the phone.
What leaves your phone, and why
Weather. To get wind, gusts, rain and swell, Boatie sends the coordinates of your home water to Open-Meteo. That's the ramp or forecast point you picked, rather than your live GPS position, and we round the coordinates to about 1 km before sending. Like any web service, they see your IP address. Open-Meteo say they keep server logs, including coordinates and IP address, for up to 90 days to run the service and stop misuse, then delete them.
Maps. Map images come from Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ Basemaps). Your phone asks LINZ for the bit of map you're looking at, so LINZ see your IP address and that map area. If the LINZ map can't load, the app may ask OpenStreetMap's map servers instead, and they would see the same kind of thing.
Subscriptions. Apple handles all payments, so we never see your card details. Apple sends us sales reports that don't say who you are.
Texts and calls. Your trip plan opens Messages with a text already written, and nothing sends until you hit Send. The 111 and *500 buttons open your phone's dialler.
Tide times, rules, ramps and fuel stops are built into the app, so looking at them sends nothing.
Permissions
Boatie only asks when you use the feature that needs it.
- Location: to record a trip you start, show your position on the Emergency screen, centre the map and find ramps near you. While a trip is recording, Boatie keeps tracking with the screen locked and your iPhone shows the blue location pill. Background tracking only ever happens while a trip you started is recording.
- Camera and photos: only when you tap to add a photo. The photo stays inside Boatie, and nothing is saved to your camera roll.
- Notifications: for reminders, your trip check in and the Day for it alert. They're all set up on your phone itself, with no push server behind them.
You can turn any of these off in iPhone Settings, then Boatie.
Kids
Boatie is made for people running a boat, and we don't knowingly collect anything from children. We don't collect personal information at all, so there's nothing for us to hold about a child either.
Your rights under the Privacy Act 2020
You can ask what personal information we hold about you and ask us to fix it. The honest answer is we hold none, because it all lives on your phone and in your own iCloud, where you're in control of it.
- Delete everything on your phone: delete the Boatie app.
- Delete your iCloud backup: on your iPhone go to Settings, tap your name, then iCloud, then Manage Storage (or Manage Account Storage), then Boatie, and delete the data.
- Stop a subscription: Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions.
If you're not happy with how we've handled a privacy question, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Changes
If we change how Boatie handles your information, we'll update this page and the date at the top, and for a big change we'll say so in the app too.
Contact
Email kyleimeson@gmail.com.
Kyle Imeson, New Zealand.
More about Boatie: spiketech.app/boatie. See also the support page and terms of use.