Why Barnaby?
Plenty of apps will record a route for you. Most of them are built for running or hiking, where pace and distance are the whole point of going out. A dog walk runs on the opposite logic: your dog sets the pace, and stopping isn't a lull in the session, it's most of what the session is for. That difference shapes a few decisions in Barnaby that a running app wouldn't make.
- Free, with no subscription and no advertising
- Never sold, never handed to ad networks or data brokers
- Usage statistics only if you agree to them
- Account and content fully deletable whenever you like
Free, with nothing owed in the small print
Every feature is free, with no subscription and no advertising. Your walks are nobody’s raw material either: they are not sold, not handed to advertising networks, and not passed to data brokers. What Barnaby needs to run is a host and a database — both in the EU, both acting only on instruction, both named in the privacy policy.
An app for walking the dog, not for training
Running apps are built around performance: training plans, pace zones, a number that's supposed to go down over time. Carry that logic into a dog walk and it breaks the thing it's supposed to measure. A runner who stops mid-session shows up as a dip on a graph; a dog who stops to work over a hedge for two straight minutes is doing exactly what the walk is for — scent work, not distance, is most of what it means to a dog. Barnaby still shows your pace, but it doesn't grade it, and there's no leaderboard nudging anyone to walk faster. The research behind that, with the source, sits in the guide on how often to walk a dog; how a walk actually gets recorded is covered under GPS tracking.
Privacy is switched on from the start
Protection for your address is running before you change a single setting. Offering it as a switch people have to go looking for strikes us as the wrong way round. The Home Zone page explains what that covers, and what it doesn’t.
Nothing is measured without permission
Whether pseudonymised usage statistics get collected is your call. They are strictly opt-in and can be withdrawn at any point. Say nothing and nothing is measured.
Leaving should be as easy as arriving
Your walks export, and your account and everything in it can be deleted from inside the app or through the delete account page, which works without the app installed. If somebody stays because leaving is a chore, that isn’t a vote of confidence.
From Vienna, under European law
Write to info@barnaby.at and a person answers. There’s no corporation with a legal department behind Barnaby, just an operator in Vienna, and European law applies. The privacy policy sets out, in full, what happens to which data.