BusNeighbor — Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 25, 2026

BusNeighbor is a free app that shows Philadelphia public transit vehicle positions, service alerts, and a map. It is built for the general public to enjoy, but with thoughtful touches for blind and low-vision riders. This policy explains what BusNeighbor does with information on your phone, and what it sends over the network and to whom.

BusNeighbor is published by Joseph D. Mirarchi, an individual. There is no company behind it and no one else has access to anything the app does. You can reach me at bus@dydx.org.

The short version

No accounts, no advertising, no analytics, no crash reporting, no tracking.
Your location never leaves your device. It is used only to draw the map and to speak the nearest stop, and only while you are using the app.
BusNeighbor does fetch transit data and map images over the internet, while you’re using it. Like any app that loads data, those requests reveal your device’s IP address and what you asked for. The table below says exactly what each service can see, and how often the app asks.
Nothing about you is ever sold or shared for advertising. The most any server keeps is the IP address and time of a request. For the mirror I run, Cloudflare deletes even that within about a month.
If you download the offline map, BusNeighbor stops making map requests entirely.

What stays on your device

Your location

You have the option to use BusNeighbor without granting location permission. If you choose to grant location permission, BusNeighbor uses your device’s location to:

center the map where you are,
show which vehicles are near you, and
announce the nearest SEPTA stop and its distance, so you can orient yourself.

All three happen entirely on your device. Your location is held only in the app’s memory while the app is running. It is never written to storage, never included in any network request, and never transmitted to me or to anyone else.

BusNeighbor uses location only while you are using the app. It does not request or use background location.

Location permission is optional. If you decline it, the app still works: the map opens at Philadelphia City Hall and every other feature behaves normally.

Nearest-stop announcements

The nearest-stop announcement is computed on your device from a list of pre-populated stops built into the app. No internet connection is needed for it, and nothing is sent anywhere to produce it.

Your settings

Your route selections, map style, marker style, and accessibility preferences are saved on your device, using your operating system’s standard app-preferences storage. They are never sent to me.

Your phone may include them in its own system backup — to your iCloud or Google account, under your control and governed by Apple’s or Google’s terms. That is what lets your settings come back if you restore or replace your device. You can turn this off in your device’s backup settings. I have no access to those backups.

Map data on your device

If you choose to download the offline map, roughly 36 MB of map data is stored on your device. Map tiles you have viewed may also be cached on your device so they load faster and use less data. Both are removed when you uninstall the app, and both can be cleared from within the app.

If you use a feature that needs each route’s regular path, such as route lines, a copy of the file describing every route’s path (a few hundred KB) is kept in the app’s cache, so it doesn’t have to be downloaded each time. Your phone may clear it, and it is removed when you uninstall the app.

Recent bus positions

To show where buses on a detoured route recently went, BusNeighbor may keep the recent positions of buses in the app’s memory while it is open. This is public transit data, not information about you. It is never written to storage and never sent anywhere.

What leaves your device, and who receives it

BusNeighbor is a client for public data. To show you where the buses are, it has to ask someone. Every request carries your device’s IP address — that is how the internet works, and it is true of every app that loads anything.

Here is every service BusNeighbor contacts, and the most that each one can see.

Service	Who runs it	Why BusNeighbor contacts it	What that service can see
BusNeighbor vehicle-position mirror	Me, using Cloudflare Workers	To fetch real-time vehicle positions, every 20 seconds or when you tap refresh, and service alerts, whenever the copy the app holds is more than 10 minutes old (it checks once a minute). For features that show where buses went on detours, it may also fetch a summary of recent bus positions, at most once each time you open the app. All of it comes from SEPTA’s public data	Your IP address and the time of the request. Each file covers the entire SEPTA system, so the requests do not reveal which routes you follow.
GitHub Releases (`jos-eph/lovmaps`)	GitHub, Inc.	To download the offline map, or — if you have not downloaded it — to stream pieces of it as you move the map	Your IP address, and, when streaming, which portions of the map file you request, which corresponds to the areas you pan to
GitHub Releases (`jos-eph/busneighbor_assets`)	GitHub, Inc.	To check for an updated list of routes, at most once a day. When you use a feature that needs each route’s regular path, such as route lines, also to check for an updated file of those paths, at most once a day; when no such feature is on, that file is never requested	Your IP address and the time of the request. Everyone gets the same files, so the requests do not reveal which routes you follow.

All of these requests use HTTPS. BusNeighbor doesn’t fetch anything in the background on its own: when you switch to another app or lock your phone, it stops checking for vehicles and alerts until you return. An offline map download you started may keep going for a short while.

One thing follows from this table that is worth saying plainly.

Whenever you pan the map without having downloaded the offline map, some third party learns roughly which part of the Philadelphia area you were looking at — not because BusNeighbor tells them where you are, but because you asked them for that piece of the map. Downloading the offline map fully removes this concern.

To download the offline map, click on the map theme (artists’ palette) button, and click on the download from cloud icon.
For increased privacy and better performance, I recommend that all users download the offline map.

About the mirror I operate

The vehicle-position mirror is mine. It runs as a Cloudflare Worker under my Cloudflare account, which means Cloudflare operates the servers that receive your request and acts as my service provider in doing so.

I have not turned on request logging or log export for that Worker, and I keep no request records of my own. Because the mirror answers at my own custom domain, Cloudflare does keep a sample of recent requests for that domain’s security dashboard: the IP address each one came from, the time, which file was requested (the same files for everyone), and whether my security rules let it through. Those rules limit how fast any one address can make requests and block abusive or automated traffic, so the mirror stays up for everyone. Cloudflare keeps this sample for every custom domain it serves, I can’t turn it off, and it is deleted after about 31 days. I look at it only to keep the mirror running and to stop abuse, never to identify anyone. I do not keep a list of who used the app or when.

Cloudflare handles what it receives under its own privacy policy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

About the other services

I do not send these services anything about you beyond what your device’s own request contains, and I receive nothing back from them about you. Each one operates independently and handles what it receives under its own privacy policy, which I neither control nor can see into:

GitHub — https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-general-privacy-statement

What BusNeighbor never does

No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
No analytics or usage tracking of any kind.
No crash reporting.
No accounts, no sign-in, no email collection.
No sale or sharing of personal information — there is nothing to sell.
No tracking of you across other apps or websites.
No background location.
No transmission of your location, to anyone, for any purpose.

BusNeighbor does not share user data with any third party. No analytics service, advertising network, data broker, or third-party SDK receives anything from this app, because no such component is in it. The services in the table above are not given user data by BusNeighbor; they see only what your device’s own network request necessarily contains.

Keeping and deleting information

Apart from the short-lived request sample Cloudflare keeps for the mirror, described above, I hold no data about you. I can’t match an IP address to a person, so I can’t find one rider’s entries to delete. They expire on their own within about 31 days. There is no account to close.

On your device:

Settings are deleted from the device when you uninstall the app. A copy may remain in your own phone’s system backup, which you control.
Downloaded map data and cached tiles can be cleared from within the app, and are deleted when you uninstall it.
Your location is never stored at all — not by the app, not by me.

The services listed in the table keep their own server logs under their own retention policies. I have no access to those logs and cannot delete anything from them on your behalf.

Your choices

Location permission can be granted or revoked at any time in your device’s settings. BusNeighbor is fully usable even if you revoke location permission.
Downloading the offline map stops BusNeighbor from requesting map data over the network at all. If you would rather not have GitHub see which areas you look at, this is how you prevent it. I recommend that all users download the offline map.
Uninstalling the app removes everything it stored on the device. If your phone backed up your settings to your own iCloud or Google account, you control that copy through your device’s backup settings.

Children

BusNeighbor is a general-audience transit app. It is not directed to children, and it does not knowingly collect information from anyone, including children under 13.

Where BusNeighbor is available

BusNeighbor is distributed in the United States only. It is not offered in the European Union or the United Kingdom. Because it is built around the SEPTA network, all intended users are in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

New Jersey and Delaware have comprehensive consumer privacy laws. As of this writing, Pennsylvania does not. Those laws reach organizations holding personal data about tens of thousands of a state’s residents. The only personal data involved here is the expiring IP sample described above, and BusNeighbor is far below those thresholds.

If you live in New Jersey or Delaware and want to exercise a privacy right — to see, correct, or delete what I hold about you — the only thing held is that sample, which I can’t link to you and which deletes itself within about a month. Write to me at the address below if you would like that confirmed directly.

Changes to this policy

If BusNeighbor’s data practices change, this policy will be updated in the same release that changes them — never afterward — and the effective date above will change. Material changes will also be noted in the app’s release notes. A short list of past revisions is kept at the bottom of this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about privacy in BusNeighbor:

bus@dydx.org

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Transit data is provided by SEPTA. BusNeighbor is not affiliated with or operated by SEPTA.

Revision history

Date	What changed
August 29, 2026	First published.
September 15, 2026	Removed SEPTA call (now fully mirrored); cosmetic improvements; minor text changes.
September 18, 2026	Listed the daily route-list check on GitHub Releases, which was missing from the table.
October 18, 2026	Added the route paths file (fetched at most once a day, only for features that use it, and cached on the device), recent bus positions for detours, and how often each request is made.
October 25, 2026	The vehicle-position mirror now uses a custom domain, secant.cc. Explained that Cloudflare keeps a short-lived sample of requests to custom domains, including IP addresses, for security, and deletes it after about 31 days.