Your travels stay in your browser

Local-first by design

MapRecap has no backend for your data. When you upload a Google Timeline export, the file is read and parsed entirely in your browser — it is never uploaded, stored on a server, or shared. Close the tab and nothing about your timeline persists, except a small amount of state you explicitly keep (see below).

When data leaves your device

Two things reach an external service — both only when you build or draw a route, and never your Google Timeline:

• Place search — when you search for a city or stop in the trip builder, the text you type is sent to an OpenStreetMap geocoding service (Nominatim) to find its coordinates.
• Road routing — to draw car, bike, train and walk trips along real roads, the start and end coordinates of those segments are sent to a public routing service (the OSRM demo server) over an encrypted connection.

Nothing else is sent — not your Google Timeline, not your home country, not your trip list. Plane and ship segments are drawn entirely on your device — the ship's sea route is computed locally from a built-in maritime map, so it never leaves your device either. Routed ground segments are cached after the first request. (The interactive map also loads map imagery from a map provider, as any web map does.) One note: if you turn an analyzed trip into an animation and pick a routed ground mode (car, bike, train or walk) for a leg, that leg's start and end coordinates are routed just like any leg you build by hand.

What is stored on your device

• Routing cache — road shapes already fetched are kept in your browser's local storage so they don't need to be requested again.
• Manual trips — trips you build by hand are saved in local storage so they survive a page reload.
• Both live only in your browser and can be cleared at any time by clearing your site data.

No accounts, no tracking

There is no sign-up and no login. We do not sell, rent, or share any data, because for the vast majority of what the app does there is no data to share — it never leaves your device.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Reach us at contact@maprecap.com