Privacy Policy

VERT for iPhone, VERT Peaks for Garmin and vertaltimeter.app · Last updated 9 November 2026

Who is responsible

Nadzeya Yashchuk, Wals-Siezenheim, Austria — the developer of VERT, acting as the data controller. Full contact details are on the Impressum page. You can reach me any time at contact@nadzeyayashchuk.com.

What stays on your phone

All of it. The app stores what you record in a database inside its own container on your device, and in the app group it shares with its own widget. Nothing in this list is transmitted anywhere:

• Altitude and pressure readings from the barometer.
• Location — the coordinates of the track you record, used to draw your route on the map and to keep the altitude honest when the barometer drifts.
• Your sessions — hikes and ski days, their segments, runs and statistics.
• Photo links — when you attach a photo to a day, VERT stores only a reference to that photo in your own photo library. The picture itself is never copied and never uploaded.
• Settings — units, compass, background choice.

There is no sign-up, no login and no cloud backup, and the app itself measures no analytics (the website's visitor analytics is separate, and described below). If you delete the app, that data is gone with it — which is also why the app lets you export any day as a GPX file for free.

Apple Health

If you allow it, VERT reads two things from Apple Health for the hours of a day you recorded: your step count and your walking, running or downhill-skiing distance. It uses them to show what you covered under your own power, so that a bus ride or a chairlift never inflates the number.

That read access is all VERT uses by default. Optionally, you can also let VERT write a finished day to Health as a workout — its distance, its elevation gain and loss, and its time. This writing is off unless you turn on Save to Health in Settings; nothing is written until you do, and no calories are ever written, because VERT does not measure them. Apart from that opt-in workout, VERT reads nothing outside the hours of a recorded session and never transmits health data anywhere. Health data is never used for advertising. You can withdraw either permission at any time in the Health app under Sharing, and VERT simply stops.

Motion and fitness

The altitude itself comes from the phone's barometer, which iOS exposes through its motion sensors — that is why the app asks for motion access, and it is the reason VERT works with no signal at all. The readings are used to compute your altitude and the shape of your day, and they stay on the device with everything else. No step or motion data is read from this sensor for any other purpose.

When you hold the camera up in Peaks, VERT also uses the motion sensors and the compass to know which way the camera points. Those readings stay on the device too.

Location

Location is optional — the app measures altitude with the barometer without it. When you grant it, the app uses your position to record the shape of your route and to anchor altitude when needed. Background location is used only while a recording is running, which is what allows the day to keep recording with the phone in your pocket and the screen off. Your coordinates leave the device only in the two cases you start yourself, described next: altitude calibration, and choosing a viewpoint in Peaks. Peaks also downloads terrain for the area around you, which reveals that area roughly, but not your position.

Altitude calibration

VERT's altimeter is self-contained, but you can pin it to the terrain height at your location. This is optional and manual: only when you open the calibration screen and tap Use the map's elevation does the app send your current coordinates to Open-Meteo, which returns the height of the ground at that point. VERT uses that number to offset the altitude it shows — your recorded gain and loss are not affected. Nothing else is sent, and nothing about you is stored: Open-Meteo sees the coordinates being asked about together with the technical details every web request carries, and handles them under its own terms. If you never use that button — or type a known elevation in by hand, which needs no network at all — no coordinates ever leave the device.

Peaks: naming summits with the camera

Peaks is part of VERT Pro. The directory of summits it uses is built into the app, so working out which peaks are around you happens on the phone and needs no connection; your position is used for that and stays on the device. Peak names come from Wikidata (CC0).

The camera. When you open the camera view, VERT reads the live picture to line the mountain skyline up with the labels. Frames are processed in the phone's memory and dropped; nothing from the camera is recorded, saved or sent. The one exception is a hidden diagnostics screen: if you open it and press its save button, VERT writes the current frame together with your coordinates as a file in the app's own folder on your phone, visible in the Files app. It stays there until you delete it or the app, and leaves the phone only if you share it yourself.

Terrain. To draw the ridge line and to hide summits that stand behind a closer ridge, Peaks needs the shape of the land around you. It downloads elevation tiles from Amazon's public terrain dataset for roughly 60 kilometres around you. The request names only which map tiles are needed, each between about 10 and 40 kilometres across, not your coordinates, but it does show which area you are in. Amazon sees that request with the technical details every web request carries, under its own privacy notice. The tiles are kept on your phone; Save this area for offline downloads them in advance.

A different viewpoint. If you choose to look from another point on the map, that point's coordinates are sent once to Open-Meteo to get its height, as in the calibration above.

Your Garmin watch. If you use the VERT Peaks watch app, VERT on your iPhone can answer the watch's request for nearby summits over Bluetooth, through the Garmin Connect app: the phone sends the watch the peaks for the zone it asked for, from the directory inside the app. Nothing goes to us or to anyone else in that exchange. This is the only reason VERT asks for Bluetooth.

Photos

When you add photos to a day, the app reads them from your photo library to display them and, if you choose, to use one as the background of a share card. It stores only the system identifier of the photo — the image is not copied into the app and is not uploaded. Removing a photo from a day only removes that link; the photo stays in your library untouched.

Advertising

The free version of VERT shows a single banner, and only in two places: the summary of a recorded day and the logbook. Ads never appear on the altimeter or while you are recording.

Those ads are delivered by Google AdMob. To serve them, Google receives technical data from your device — this typically includes a device identifier, coarse location derived from your IP address, device and OS information, and data about ad interactions. This processing is done by Google as an independent party, under Google's privacy policy. I do not receive this data, and I do not combine it with anything else.

VERT does not ask for permission to track you across other companies' apps and websites, and does not do so.

Purchases

VERT Pro is a one-time in-app purchase handled by Apple. The payment goes to Apple, not to me — I never see your name, your address or your payment details. The app only asks Apple whether this Apple ID owns the purchase, and stores the yes-or-no answer on the device so the widget knows too.

VERT Peaks (Garmin watch app)

VERT Peaks reads your watch's GPS position and magnetic heading. Both stay on the watch — the app uses them to work out which summits are near you and which one you are facing.

The only thing it sends is a zone identifier such as 23_6: a square roughly 200 kilometres across, not your position. Your coordinates never leave the watch. If VERT is installed on your iPhone, the watch can get the list from the phone instead, as described under Peaks.

There is no account, no sign-in, no device identifier, no analytics and no advertising. The downloaded peak list is cached on the watch so it works offline, and is removed when you delete the app. Our server receives the zone request with your IP address, as any web request does; we do not use it to identify anyone.

Peak data comes from Wikidata (CC0). The watch app has no camera and no maps, and no access to your activities, health data or messages.

This website

The page you are reading is served by Cloudflare Pages. Like any web server, it processes the IP address and browser details of each request in order to deliver the page and to defend against attacks; these are kept in short-lived operational logs by Cloudflare as processor. The fonts, the images and the small script that draws the mountains all come from this domain — nothing else is embedded.

The site also uses Google Analytics 4 to understand, in aggregate, how many people visit and which pages they read. IP addresses are truncated before storage (anonymize_ip), so we cannot see who you are, and the data is never linked to any account or used to target advertising.

Analytics runs under Google Consent Mode, and consent decides when:

• If you are in the EU, the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, no analytics cookies are set and nothing is measured until you accept the cookie banner. Decline it, or ignore it, and analytics stays off.
• Everywhere else, where consent is not legally required, analytics is on by default. You can still switch it off with your browser's Do Not Track setting or Google's opt-out add-on.

To withdraw consent after granting it, clear this site's data in your browser and the banner will ask again. Google acts as our processor for analytics; see Google's Privacy Policy. This is the only analytics on the site, and it exists on the website only — the VERT app itself measures nothing.

The elevation page

What is my elevation? is a small tool on this site that turns a location into a height. It does nothing until you press its button, and your browser asks for your permission before it hands over any location at all. Decline, and the page still works — you can type coordinates in by hand, which needs no permission and reveals nothing about where you are.

When you do use it, the coordinates in question are sent to Open-Meteo to read the height of the terrain at that point. If Open-Meteo is unreachable, the same lookup is made against Amazon's public terrain tiles instead. Those services see the coordinates being asked about, together with the technical details every web request carries, and handle them under their own terms — Open-Meteo and AWS.

We never receive those coordinates ourselves. They are not logged, not stored on a server — this site has none of its own — and not kept in your browser. Close the page and the number is gone.

Children

VERT is not directed at children and collects nothing about them. It has no social features, no messaging and no user-generated content shared with anyone.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access, correct, delete and port your personal data, and to object to its processing. In VERT's case this is unusually simple: because I hold none of your data, the data is entirely in your hands — you can view, export and delete every recorded day inside the app itself. For anything concerning the advertising described above, please contact Google, or write to me and I will help. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (Österreichische Datenschutzbehörde, Barichgasse 40–42, 1030 Vienna, dsb.gv.at).

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will appear on this page with a new date. If a change ever affects what leaves your device, it will be said plainly, at the top.

Contact

Questions about any of this are welcome: contact@nadzeyayashchuk.com.