Privacy policy

What we hold about you

Your email address, because it is how you sign in. A handle and, if you give one, a display name, a race number, your car and two livery colours — all of which appear on timing screens, which is what they are for.

Your birth year. It decides one thing — whether the social features are available to you — and it is never shown on your profile or to anybody else.

Your recordings: the GNSS trace, the lap times derived from it, which circuit you drove and when, and the serial of the device that recorded it.

The ordinary technical record of requests to our servers, which we use to keep them working and to stop abuse.

If you ask us to add a venue without signing in, the email address you leave on the request, if you leave one. A person here may write to you about that request, and it is used for nothing else. It is deleted from the request when the request is decided, or 90 days after you made it if nobody has decided it by then; any mail we exchanged about it is kept like the rest of our mail, below.

If you write to us — to ask for the Android app, or about anything else — your message, the address it came from, and our reply. A person reads it and uses it to answer you and for nothing else. It is kept in our mailbox rather than in Apex, so erasing your account does not reach it; ask at privacy@apexracetiming.com and we will delete it.

If you tick the box on your profile asking to be told when the app is in the stores, we will use your email address to send you one message, when the Apex app can be installed from the app stores, and for nothing else. Untick it and you will not get it.

Who can see it

Every outing has an audience you choose: private, your approved friends, or public. New outings default to friends. Whether the trace behind a lap is shared is a separate switch from whether the lap time is, and it can be narrower.

A venue whose circuit you drive, or whose organised day lists you as an entrant, can be given your entry: your name, your laps, and whether you appear on the day’s public dashboard. Those are three switches on your profile and they apply to your next outing, not to ones already recorded. The third gives way at a venue’s organised day: while you drive in its event, your live position is shown on that venue’s timing screens whatever the switch says, because those screens are what the day is run on.

Your follower count is public. The list of who follows you, and who you follow, is not — you are the only person who can see either.

You can block another racer from their page. From then on neither of you can see the other’s profile or outings, any following between you ends in both directions, and a live outing either of you is watching of the other stops at once. They are not told. A block cannot take you off what is shown to everyone — a public track map, or a venue’s own screens — and unblocking, from your profile page, does not bring the follows back.

When Apex administration reads an outing of yours from its own desk, it has to give a reason — you asked us, a venue asked, somebody reported it, its data looked wrong, or we were required to. Each read is logged with its reason, and the outing’s page tells you, and only you, the day it happened and why. It does not name the person who read it.

Under 16, there is no public profile and no social surface at all. A stranger asking for an under-16 handle gets the same answer as for a handle that does not exist.

How long we keep it

If you have an account, your recordings stay until you delete them.

If a venue gave you an account without your asking — at its sign-on desk, or from the entry list it loaded for a day — and it was never claimed, the telemetry trace and the raw files it recorded are destroyed after a short grace period, automatically. The account itself — including the name the venue wrote down or listed — is erased ninety days after the venue made it, or, for a guest listed ahead of the day, ninety days after that day’s end as it stood when the list was loaded, also automatically. The lap times stay in the venue’s event history, because they are the venue’s record of a day that happened, and they carry no account behind them.

That grace period is what claiming is for: claim the account with the code on your slip and the trace is yours to keep.

Separately from all of that, we keep database backups for fourteen days so that a hardware failure or a mistake on our side cannot destroy everybody’s history at once. They are copies of the same data, kept no longer than that, and the erasure section says what they mean if you ask to be forgotten.

Erasure

There is a control on your profile page that erases your account. It asks you to type your handle, and then it happens — there is no waiting period and nothing for anyone here to approve. Your account, your traces and your name are gone from the live system in one step, and nobody here can put them back.

The raw recorded files are destroyed in the same act, but not in the same instant: they live in an object store rather than in the database, so each one is queued for destruction as the record of it is dropped, and the queue is drained within minutes. It retries until the file is actually gone rather than assuming it went.

You can also write to privacy@apexracetiming.com and ask us to do it, which is the way in if you have lost access to the account you want erased.

Either way destroys every telemetry trace, the raw recorded files, your email address, your sign-in identities and sessions, your birth year, your vehicles, and anything social. Your handle is released for anyone else to take. Your lap times remain in the venue’s event history without your name attached, and event entries remain as a participant count.

Backups are one exception, and we would rather write it down than let you find it out. We keep database backups for fourteen days, because the alternative is that one failed disk takes every racer’s history with it. An erasure removes you from the live system immediately and is never undone from a backup — restoring one to bring somebody back is not something this product does. What is true is that a backup taken before you erased still contains you until it expires, which is within fourteen days.

A timing unit you borrow, from a venue or from anybody else, is another. Where it has memory of its own, it records your outing there as well as sending it to your phone, so that a dropped connection costs you nothing. Our app reads that memory only to fill the gaps in the outing it is recording, and never clears it. So when you hand the unit back, what it recorded of you stays on it, and whoever holds it next may be able to read it. Everything this page says about keeping and erasing is about what we hold, not about hardware that is not ours.

Mail you have sent us is a third: it lives in our mailbox, not in Apex, so the control does not reach it. Ask at privacy@apexracetiming.com and we will delete it too.

We also keep the record of what you agreed to and when — the log described in the next section. It is the evidence that we asked, which is the one thing erasing would make impossible to establish afterwards, including for you.

One refusal, and it is the only one: if you are the last owner of a venue, the control will not run until somebody else owns it too. A venue nobody owns cannot be administered by anyone, including the people running a day at it.

The record of what you agreed to

When you create an account we record that you agreed to these documents, which version you were shown, and when. If you are asked an optional question — whether you want the one email we will send when the app is in the stores, for instance — we record your answer to that too, including when it is no.

If a venue lends you a timing unit at its event, the person handing it over tells you that while you hold it your position is shown live on that venue’s timing screens and your lap times stay in that day’s results. We record that you were told, once for each event, in the same record — an account the desk made for you on the day included.

That record is append-only. Changing your mind adds an entry rather than replacing one, so the history of what you were asked and what you said stays intact.

Your agreement and your answer about email are on your profile page. If you want the full history, the desk’s record included, ask us at the address above.

What we do not do

We do not sell your data, and we do not carry advertising or advertising trackers.

We do count how often each page of the site is shown, a day at a time, to see whether a change to it helped. The count is the kind of page, the date and a number: a racer’s page is counted as a racer’s page, never as yours or theirs. It sets no cookie and keeps no address, nothing about your browser and nothing about your account, so it cannot tell one reader from another or follow anybody anywhere.

We do not record video of you, anywhere, ever.

We do not use your traces to build a profile of you for anything other than showing you your own driving.

Maps and third parties

The map behind a circuit’s mark-up is OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database Licence and attributed wherever it appears. The map images themselves are never stored — they are a picture that helps somebody put a point in the right place.

The map on the page for asking us to add a venue has a place search. What you type there and search for is sent from our server to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service, and nothing else about you is: not where you are, not your address on the internet, and not your account. Nothing you search for is stored. Type a place, not a person.

We send email through a mail provider, which necessarily sees your address and what we send you: sign-in links, mail about a venue you asked us to add, and — if you asked for it — the one email when the app is in the stores.

Getting in touch

Apex is run by Apex Support, and “we” on this page means Apex Support.

privacy@apexracetiming.com, for anything on this page: a question, a correction, or a request to be erased. support@apexracetiming.com, for anything else.

This policy is version 2026-10-30. When it changes, your profile page will show that your agreement is behind and offer you the new one.