Privacy Policy

VERT for iPhone and vertaltimeter.app · Last updated 20 July 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.

This access is read-only. VERT never writes anything to Health, never reads anything outside the hours of a recorded session, and never transmits health data anywhere. Health data is never used for advertising. You can withdraw this permission at any time in the Health app under Sharing, and VERT simply stops showing those two figures.

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.

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 are never sent off the device.

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.

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.