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 and bike 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, train, walk and ship segments are drawn locally and never leave your device, and routed 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 road mode (car or bike) 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