Home Zone & privacy
An app that records where you go ends up knowing where you live. Barnaby assumes you would rather keep that to yourself, and ships set up that way.
How a route gives away an address
Dog walks nearly always begin and end in the same place. Lay two or three shared walks on top of one another and that shared point stands out immediately. From there to a house number is one map search.
What the Home Zone does
You choose how many metres come off the beginning and the end of a walk. Barnaby cuts exactly that stretch, so the visible beginning moves outward and the ending does the same. The default is 50 metres and anything between 25 and 125 works. Where only one end matters, you can trim just the start or just the finish. You never enter your address for this — the app has no idea where you live.
It is on before you touch anything. Finding the setting is only necessary if you want to change it.
Why the radius stops at 125 metres
Running and hiking apps offer privacy zones running from several hundred metres up to a mile. Barnaby stops at 125. That is geometry rather than thrift: a run is ten kilometres, a dog walk is two. Take 500 metres off each end of two kilometres and the two zones meet in the middle — nothing is left to show, and Barnaby falls back to a single point.
How much you need depends on how tightly your area is built. In a dense city centre fifty metres already covers a dozen doorways — your walk could have started at any of them, and the default is enough. The more spread out the housing, the fewer houses are in the running, so out in the suburbs or the countryside 100 or 125 metres is the better setting.
What the Home Zone does not do
It removes the point, not the pattern. The cut always lands at exactly the radius you set, so the visible starts of your walks all sit roughly the same distance from your door — on a ring around your home. From one walk there is nothing to read. Someone who overlays many public walks by the same person can narrow down the centre of that ring. The Home Zone makes that work considerably harder than it would otherwise be; it does not make it impossible. If this matters to you, a private account is the stronger switch: then only people you have approved see the walk at all.
You see what everyone else sees
Your own walk looks just as trimmed to you as it does to a stranger, in the feed and on your profile alike. That was a deliberate call: anyone shown the full route on their own screen would be guessing about whether the radius is generous enough. Open a walk for editing and both versions sit on top of each other — grey for the complete recording, green for the part other people receive. That is where you judge the radius, and nowhere else.
Where the complete recording lives
The trimming happens on your phone, before anything is uploaded. The document that the feed and your profile draw their map from only ever holds the shortened version, so an untrimmed public route never exists on the server in the first place.
The complete recording is still stored — without it there would be no GPX export. It sits apart, in its own document per walk, which the server rules open to your account and no other. You will not find the words “it never leaves your device” here, because that would be untrue. It does leave, and it lands somewhere nobody else can reach.
When the app reads your location
The only thing stored as a route is what happens between Start and the end of the walk. Beyond that the app asks for your location while you have it open, for the map and for local notes such as the weather or a heat warning. None of those lookups are kept as a track. With no walk running, nothing is recorded in the background.
Private really is private
Set your account to private and only confirmed followers can see your walks. This is not a display setting somebody could route around: visibility is enforced on the server, so private walks stay protected even if someone tries to fetch them without going through the app. Following and feeds are explained over on community.
Take it all, or delete it all
Individual walks come out as GPX files, and your whole account comes out as a JSON file with everything in it. If you want to leave, you delete the account inside the app. No form, no follow-up question, no waiting for a reply.
How the data sits
Everything travels encrypted over HTTPS and TLS, and passwords are only ever stored hashed. Who may read which content is decided by security rules on the server rather than by the app. For the complete route that rule is drawn tightest: it admits the account that recorded the walk, and nobody else.
Questions about this feature? They live in the frequently asked questions.