Cloudbase Alti - Privacy

This page covers the Cloudbase Alti watch app on its own - the version you install from the Connect IQ store and can use without an account. It is deliberately short, because the app collects very little.

If you also use the Cloudbase phone app and have signed in, the main privacy policy covers that account and everything in it. This page is about the watch.

1. Who we are

Cloudbase Alti is developed by Cloudbase App Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17143982). You can reach us at hello@getcloudbase.com.

2. What stays on your watch

Everything the app records for you. Your sessions - altitude, timings, the readings the app derives from them, and the GPS track when your watch records one - are stored on the watch itself.

If you use the app without the Cloudbase phone app, that is where they stay. We never receive them, and there is no account for them to belong to.

If you do use the phone app and have signed in, your sessions are sent to your phone over Bluetooth and saved to your account, because that is the point of pairing them. That data is then covered by the main privacy policy. Your settings can also be backed up to your account so a factory reset or a new watch does not lose them.

3. Anonymous diagnostic reports

This is the one thing the watch app sends by itself, and the reason this page exists.

When the app stops unexpectedly, or finishes a session in a state it knows is wrong, it saves a short diagnostic record. If your watch is paired with the Cloudbase phone app, that record travels through the phone. If it is not - if you only ever installed the watch app - the watch sends it to us directly over the internet instead.

Without this, a problem that only affects people who do not use the phone app is invisible to us: no report ever arrives, so it never gets fixed. That is the entire purpose. It is not analytics, it is not advertising, and none of it is shared with anyone or used to build a profile.

What a report contains

• The app version, and your watch model (as its Garmin part number).
• What the app was doing when it stopped, as a short internal label.
• The watch's free and total memory, and its battery percentage.
• The last few button presses the app saw, as timings only - for example "a down-press 0.4 seconds before". This distinguishes "something the app did" from "something a button did".
• A short internal status string. For one report type this is a list of times and labels describing how GPS acquisition went during a session.
• An altitude figure and the watch's clock time, as context for the report, plus the app's own internal reference for the session it was saving.
• A random identifier generated on your watch. It exists so that ten reports from one watch are not mistaken for one report from ten watches. It is not derived from you, your watch's serial number, or anything Garmin knows about you.

What a report does not contain

• No name, email address, or account - when the watch sends directly, there is no account involved at all.
• No coordinates, and no map position of any kind.
• No recorded track, and none of your session history.
• Nothing from Garmin Connect, and no other app's data.

Reports are capped at a small fixed size and are limited to a set list of fields, so nothing else can travel with them. As with any internet request, our server sees the IP address the request came from.

4. Turning it off

On the watch: Settings › Advanced › Crash reports. Turn it off and the app stops sending them. Nothing else about the app changes.

It is on by default, and we want to be straight about why: the people this feature exists for are the ones we have no other way of hearing from, and a setting they would have to go looking for would be found by almost nobody. If you would rather not send them, the switch is one screen away and we will not ask again.

On some watch models with less memory - the fēnix 5 and fēnix 6S - the app has no way of sending anything over the internet at all, so there is nothing to turn off.

5. How long we keep reports

Diagnostic reports are kept for as long as they are useful for fixing the problem they describe, and no longer than 24 months.

Because a directly-sent report carries no account and no identifying information, we cannot look one up as yours, which also means we cannot delete an individual report on request - there is nothing to match it against. If you want to stop sending them, use the setting in section 4.

6. Your rights

If you have a Cloudbase account, your rights over the data in it - access, correction, export, deletion - are set out in the main privacy policy, and you can exercise them from the app or by emailing us.

If you only use the watch app, you have no account with us and we hold nothing that identifies you. Your sessions are on your watch, under your control.

7. Contact

Questions about this page, or about anything the watch app does, are welcome at hello@getcloudbase.com.