Terms of use

What you may publish

Any route your phone holds: a GPX file you imported, a route you planned in the app, or one saved from a ride you recorded. You publish one route at a time, from a form that shows you on a map exactly what is about to be sent.

You may also rate somebody else's route — one to five stars, and nothing else: a rating carries no words. It is never shown with your name.

The one thing you may not publish is a route you downloaded from this catalogue. It is already here. The app does not offer the action for one, and the catalogue refuses a line it already holds.

You do not have to have ridden a route to publish it. The shelf marks the ones that were ridden, so a reader can tell the difference.

What you promise when you publish

Every publication carries a declaration you tick: this route is mine, or I have the right to publish it. Nobody can verify that for you — not us and not another rider — so the catalogue runs on what that tick means:

• It is yours to publish. You recorded it, planned it or drew it, or whoever did gave you the right to. A file you downloaded from another service, or found on a website, is not yours to publish because you happen to have it.
• It exposes nobody's private information. Not where somebody lives, not their name, not where they were and when. Your own start and finish are your decision, and the publication form has a switch that hides both.
• It is not offensive. The title and the description are read by strangers, and some of them are children.
• It is not advertising, and it is not the same thing published again and again.

Those four are also the four reasons anybody can report a published route under, and they are what your declaration is checked against when it turns out to be false. What may and may not be published is set out in the content policy.

What you let us do with what you publish

When you publish, you grant Mintakka a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive licence, free of charge, to store what you published, to show it in the app and on the shelf, and to let anybody download it — together with the technical copies and the figures computed from it that doing so needs.

You keep everything you had. The route is still yours: publish it wherever else you like and do what you want with your own copy. This licence lets us run the catalogue; it takes nothing away from you and it gives us no ownership of your route.

What you publish to the community stays with the community. A route other riders have downloaded and rated does not disappear because one person changed their mind. There are two ways for it to come off the shelf and only two:

• You, while your account exists. Delete it yourself from Routes → Published, one route at a time, whenever you like. It is a deletion and it is told to you as one: its stars, its rating and the times it was downloaded go with it, and publishing the same route again is a new publication that starts at nothing. The route itself stays in your library — what you destroy is the publication.
• Moderation, when what was published breaks the content policy. What a moderator has taken down, you cannot put back.

Deleting your account does not take your routes off the shelf. They stay, and they lose your signature: your name and the link to your account are erased, and what is left is a line on a map that belongs to nobody. If you do not want a route to stay, delete it before you delete your account.

What you may do with a route you download

Taking a route from the catalogue into your library costs nothing. What you may then do with the route depends on which of the two kinds it is, and the shelf marks every route with its kind.

A route marked Official is ours, built from OpenStreetMap data or taken from a public register, and published under the licence its page names: the ODbL for OpenStreetMap, the register's own for the rest. What those licences ask of you is on the attribution page.

A route marked Community was published by another rider under these terms. Download it, ride it, walk it, keep it on your phone, put it on your GPS device, print it — it is there to be ridden. What it is not is material to republish: do not put somebody else's route on another site or in another app, do not sell it, and do not build a product out of it. If you want to do more with it than ride it, ask the rider who published it.

Neither kind may be taken out in bulk. There is no export of the catalogue and no permission to assemble one — downloading route after route to build a collection is not use of the shelf, and these terms do not allow it.

Routes the app plans for you

When you drop waypoints in the planner, the line the app draws between them is computed over OpenStreetMap data. The same is true of the way back it retraces for you, and of a line it recomputes when you have left the route.

Mintakka credits OpenStreetMap wherever it draws a map, and that is the whole of what is owed — see the attribution page. You have nothing to add and nothing to carry: a route you planned is yours to publish like any other.

A route is not a guarantee

Nobody has checked these routes. The ones we built come from open data and we have not walked them; the ones riders published are somebody's own outing. Neither we nor anybody else has verified where a route goes, whether it is passable, whether it is permitted, or whether it is safe.

Where a route is described as an official or signposted trail, that is how it is mapped in OpenStreetMap. On-ground signage always prevails over anything shown on your screen.

Conditions change. A path can be closed, flooded, overgrown, rerouted, buried in snow or simply gone. Check local information before you set out, carry a map and the means to use it, and judge for yourself what you are able to do on the day.

You use the catalogue at your own risk. To the extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for loss or damage arising from the use of a route, nor for what another rider published.

Your own library, and how long we keep it

Separately from anything you publish, Mintakka keeps a private copy of your own routes and outings, so that your history survives a lost phone and follows you to a new one and to the web. Nobody but you can read it.

All of it is kept for everybody, always, at no charge: the figures — the date, the distance, the elevation, the time and the small preview line — and the full track, the one that lets you navigate an outing again. Keeping any of it costs nothing, and nothing in it is deleted to save space. A copy of everything is on your phone throughout.

Deleting is deleting. Delete an outing or a route in one place and it is gone from every place. There is no bin, no undo and no recovery period, and we say so before you confirm.

An account nobody signs into for two years is deleted, with everything in it, and we write to you first. That is about not keeping somebody's data after they have stopped using the app — it is not a storage charge and it is not a penalty for not subscribing.

When something is taken down

A published route can be hidden or removed, and an account can be stopped from publishing, when what was published breaks the content policy. A rating cannot: it is a star with no words in it, so there is nothing in one to take down. Nothing is destroyed when a route goes: it keeps its line, its figures and its stars, and only its state changes. What is on your phone is untouched — it was always yours.

You are told, by e-mail and in the app, in your own language: what was decided, the reason, and the day. If you think we got it wrong, write to the address at the foot of this page and a person will read it.

If these terms change

We publish the change on this page and the date at the foot of it moves. If you keep publishing after that, that is your acceptance.

If you do not agree with a change, stop publishing and delete the routes you published. What you have already published stays under the licence you granted at the time you published it.