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

Three things reach an external service — all of them only when you build or draw a route, and never your Google Timeline:

Place search — the trip builder answers from a list of ~2,000 cities bundled with the site, so most searches never leave your device at all. Only when you look for somewhere it does not have — a village, a street, a specific address — is the text you typed sent to an OpenStreetMap geocoding service (Nominatim) to find its coordinates.
Point lookup — when you drag a stop on the map, or click the map to place one, that point's coordinates are sent to the same service the other way round, to find out what the place is called. It runs only on the gesture itself, never while you pan or zoom.
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 the trip list as a whole. Plane and ship segments are drawn entirely on your device — the ship's sea route is computed locally from a built-in maritime map — though a stop on such a leg still goes through the point lookup above if you place it by dragging or clicking the map. Routed ground segments are cached after the first request. (Map styles: Midnight, Light and Stylized are drawn from country outlines bundled with the site, so they make no requests at all and nobody can see what you are looking at. The Satellite and Terrain styles do fetch imagery, from EOX.) 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.

Feedback you choose to send

The Feedback button and the prompt after an export are the one other thing that sends data, and only when you press Send. It carries what you typed, the quick-pick tags you chose, and a few technical details shown on the card first: your browser and screen size, the engine and style you used, and — if you rated a problem — a short log of this session's errors, ticked by default and removable with one click. That log holds error types, messages and file names from our own code; it never contains your trip, places, coordinates or anything you typed. Nothing is sent unless you press Send.

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