TRIPLED UP

Privacy Policy

Last updated 13 September 2026

This policy describes what Tripled Up ("the app," "we," "us") collects, why, and how it is handled. It is written to match what the app actually does, rather than generic boilerplate.

Your use of Tripled Up is also governed by our Terms of Service.

Who this covers

Tripled Up is a social app for the commercial fishing community in and around Cape Cod Bay. It is not directed at children, and account creation requires a working phone number capable of receiving an SMS verification code.

What we collect

Your account and profile

Phone number. Collected at sign-up and verified via a one-time SMS code (sent through our verification provider, Twilio). Verification is what unlocks posting — we treat it as your identity guarantee, not your email. By default, your phone number is shown on your profile so other users can reach you directly (tapping it opens Messages) — you can turn this off anytime in your profile settings, which hides it from everyone else's view of your profile. It's also used, in hashed form, to help you find friends who are already on the app from your contacts (see below) — that use isn't affected by the display setting.

Email address. Collected at sign-up for account recovery. Confirming it is optional — the app is fully usable without confirming your email — but we recommend it in case you ever need to reset your password. Like your phone number, your email is shown on your profile by default (tapping it opens Mail) and can be hidden with the same profile setting — one toggle controls both.

Profile details. Your display name, and anything else you choose to add — your full name, home port, a short bio and a profile photo — are shown on your profile to other users.

Reports and their locations

Reports. When you post a sighting, bite, catch, or condition report, we store what you entered — the report type, species, method, fishing style, outcome (for example, whether a bite was caught or lost), caption and any photo — along with the time and your GPS location at that moment. You choose who a report is shared with: just you, your friends, a specific boat or group, or everyone ("global").

Report locations. Anyone who can see a report can see its exact location on the map — that includes global reports, which are visible to every user of the app. In the feed, a global report's location is shown randomly offset by up to roughly a nautical mile unless the viewer is your friend, but the map shows the exact point. If you don't want a spot known, share the report with a narrower audience or keep it to yourself.

Conditions. To record the conditions a report was made in, we look up the weather, sea state, tide, water temperature and depth for the report's location and time, and store them with the report. We also do this for your current location while you're filling in a report, to show you live conditions. Only the coordinates (and the time) are sent to the data providers listed below — nothing that identifies you.

Your log book. The app can export your own reports and their conditions as a spreadsheet file. The file is created on your device, and you decide where it goes.

Trips and location sharing

Trip tracking. If you start a trip, the app records your boat's position until the trip ends, including while the app is in the background or your phone is locked — this is why the app asks for "Always" location access. A trip ends when you end it, when the app detects the trip has finished, or after 24 hours at most. Positions on land are discarded before they are stored, so a trip you forget to end doesn't record where you drive afterwards. Recording only happens during a trip you started; declining background location still leaves the rest of the app usable.

Who sees your trips. A trip recorded on a boat is visible to that boat's crew by default — you can turn this off when you start the trip. Beyond that, a track is only seen by the people you share it with.

Sharing a trip. You can share a trip with chosen friends, boats or groups. They can see the trip's track for 24 hours from when you share it, unless you stop sharing sooner, and they may be sent a notification that you shared it. Some things to know:

  • A track can reveal where your reports were made. By default, sharing leaves a gap in the shared track for 15 minutes either side of each report you made on that trip, so the track can't be used to find your spots. You can switch that off, and the app will tell you how many report locations that reveals.
  • Live position is optional and off by default. If you turn it on, the people you shared with can also see where you are right now. Only your latest position is kept — not a history — and it is cleared when the trip ends or you stop sharing.
  • Other users can ask you to share. A friend, or someone on your boat, can send you a request to share your location. Nothing is shared unless you accept, and an unanswered request expires after 2 hours.

Trip recording diagnostics. While a trip records, the app also uploads counts and timings describing how well it recorded — for example, how many positions the phone provided and how many were filtered out. These contain no locations, and are used only to fix recording problems.

Other location uses

We also ask for location access if you set up hot-spot alerts — we store the point you choose and your alert radius, so we can notify you when reporting activity picks up nearby — and if you choose to share a location in a direct message. A location you attach to a message is shown exactly to the people you sent it to, since sharing it is an explicit, one-time action you take.

Photos

If you attach a photo to a report, a message, or your profile, that photo is stored and shown to whoever the report/message/profile is visible to. Apart from the catch verification described immediately below, we don't scan or use your photos for anything beyond displaying them where you posted them.

Catch verification. Because a reported catch earns leaderboard points, photos attached to catch reports (and only catch reports) are checked automatically to keep the leaderboard honest. The check looks at three things: whether the photo shows the species you said you caught, whether it looks like an original photo rather than a stock image or screenshot, and whether it matches a photo already submitted with an earlier catch report.

To do this, the catch photo and the species you declared are sent to Anthropic's Claude API. Nothing else goes with it — not your name, your account, your location, or your contacts. The result is never an automatic penalty: if a check doesn't pass, the report is put in front of a human admin to decide, exactly like a report that someone has flagged. Only an admin can remove a report or take away its points.

Photos attached to messages, to your profile, or to non-catch reports are not sent anywhere for analysis.

Contacts and invitations

Finding friends (optional). If you choose to use "find friends from contacts," your phone hashes each contact's phone number on your device before anything is sent to our servers — for this, we only ever receive hashes, never your contacts' actual phone numbers, names, or other contact info. We use those hashes only to tell you which of your contacts already have a Tripled Up account.

Inviting contacts by email (optional). You can pick contacts to invite by email. Only the contacts you select leave your phone: we receive their email address and name, and send them one invitation, from your name, through our email provider. We keep a record of each invitation (the address, the name, and when it was sent) so nobody gets invited twice by the same person, and we record whether the invitation link was followed. Every invitation has an unsubscribe link; an address that unsubscribes is never emailed an invitation again, by anyone.

Declining contacts access is fully supported; nothing else in the app is affected if you skip it.

Messages and comments

Direct messages, boat messages, and group messages (including any photo or location attached to them) are stored and delivered to the people or group you sent them to. They aren't visible to anyone else, including us, except as needed to operate the service (e.g., delivering a push notification) or to review a specific message you or someone else has flagged (see Moderation, below). If read receipts are on, the people you message can see when you've read their messages; you can turn them off in settings. Comments on a report are visible to everyone who can see that report.

Usage and device information

Usage data. We record app events — for example opening the app, the sign-up steps, creating reports, likes, sending invitations, content flags and which screens are viewed — to understand how the app is used and where people get stuck. Events from before you sign in are tied to a random identifier the app generates for itself when it's installed; once you sign up, they're linked to your account. A copy of these events is sent to our analytics provider, PostHog, after we strip any personal content from them. Our website uses PostHog too, and if you sign up with the same email address you used on the website, your website visits are linked to your app account.

Device information. Each time you open the app, it reports your platform (iOS, Android or web), operating-system version, device model and app version, so our admins can see what version you're running when you report a problem.

Device push token. If you allow notifications, we store a device token (via Apple/Google's push services) so we can deliver notifications like new messages, friend requests, shared trips and hot-spot alerts. You can revoke this anytime in your device's notification settings.

Usage data and device information are never used for advertising; we don't have ads, and we don't sell data to anyone.

Siri. On iPhone, you can ask Siri to start a report. This only opens the app with the report pre-filled; the app doesn't send anything anywhere until you post the report. Your voice request is handled by Apple under Apple's own privacy policy.

Who else sees your data

We use a small number of service providers to run the app, each of whom only receives what they need to do their specific job:

  • Twilio — sends the SMS verification code during sign-up. Receives your phone number for that purpose only.
  • Supabase — hosts our database, file storage, and backend infrastructure. All app data described above lives there.
  • Expo / Apple / Google — deliver push notifications to your device via their standard push services.
  • Resend — delivers the emails we send: account emails such as confirmation and account-deletion links, and invitations you send to your contacts. Receives the recipient's address and the contents of the email.
  • PostHog — analyzes app and website usage. Receives the usage events described above, your account's internal identifier, the app's install identifier, and the email address you signed up with (used only to link website visits to your account).
  • Open-Meteo, NOAA, and OpenTopoData — provide weather, marine, tide, water and depth data for reports. Receive only a location and time, with nothing that identifies you.
  • Mapbox — generates the small map-thumbnail image shown for a shared location in a message. Only the coordinates needed to draw that specific thumbnail are sent.
  • Anthropic — analyzes photos attached to catch reports for the catch verification described above. Receives the catch photo and the species you declared, and nothing else that identifies you.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

Moderation and administration

If you or someone else flags a post, an admin can review the flagged content (report or message) to decide whether to dismiss the flag, remove the content, or warn/block the account. This is the one case where content you posted, that wasn't otherwise shared with an admin, may be reviewed by one — specifically and only the flagged item, for the purpose of resolving that flag.

To run the service and support users, admins can also see account details (including your phone number and email, whatever your display setting), the device information described above, and overall activity reports.

You can also block another user yourself, which stops them sending you messages or friend requests.

Your choices

  • Showing your phone number and email on your profile is on by default and can be turned off anytime from your profile page — doing so hides both from other users' view of your profile immediately. It doesn't affect phone-hash contact matching (see above), which never shows your actual number to anyone regardless of this setting.
  • Who sees a report is chosen each time you post one — and remember that anyone who can see it can see its exact location on the map.
  • Trips are only recorded when you start one. You choose whether a trip is visible to your crew, who you share it with, whether live position is on, and you can stop sharing at any time.
  • Contacts, location (including background location), camera, and notification permissions are all optional and can be changed anytime in your device settings; declining any of them still leaves the rest of the app usable.
  • Read receipts can be turned off in settings.
  • Deleting your account and data: you can do this yourself at any time, and you don't need to contact us. There are two ways:
    • In the app — You → Profile → Delete account. This takes effect immediately.
    • On the web, without installing the app — go to https://www.tripledup.com/delete-account, enter your email address, and click the link we email you to confirm. We ask you to confirm by email so that nobody else can delete your account by entering your address.

Either route permanently removes your profile, reports, photos, exact locations, trips and their tracks, location shares and live position, messages, comments, likes, flags, friendships, memberships, invitations you sent, leaderboard standings, device information, notification settings and push tokens. It cannot be undone.

If you own a boat or group, we'll ask you who should take it over before anything is deleted — a boat can't be left without an owner, and it belongs to its crew as much as to you. You can name someone yourself or let us pick the longest-serving senior crew member. A boat or group with no other members is deleted along with your account.

Data retention

We keep your data, including your trip tracks, for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we remove your profile, reports, trips, messages, and other account-linked content, except where we're required to keep something longer (for example, moderation records tied to a safety action already taken on the platform).

Some things outlive a deletion, and we'd rather be explicit about them:

  • Boats and groups you owned pass to another member rather than being deleted, as described above.
  • If you deleted your account through the web page, we keep a record of that request — your email address and the dates — so we can show the request was made and honoured. We use it for nothing else.
  • Usage events stay in our database, but are no longer linked to your account. The copies already sent to PostHog are not deleted automatically; email us and we'll have them removed.
  • If someone you invited unsubscribes, we keep their email address on our do-not-email list so the promise not to email them again holds.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, let you know in the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: support@tripledup.com