What is collected
Location
Precise location, while you drive. A run cannot be timed or scored without it. Location is also used, coarsely, to list courses near you. Background location is collected only during an active run — not when the app is closed and not between runs.
Motion
Accelerometer and gyroscope at up to 50 Hz during a run. Smoothness and control are measured from these; without them a score is just a stopwatch.
Account
If you sign in: an account identifier from Apple or Google, a username you choose, and a display name. Sign-in is optional. The app drives, scores and stores runs on the device without an account — you just cannot appear on a leaderboard.
Purchases
Apple tells our server that a subscription started, renewed, lapsed or was refunded. We never receive your card details, and Apple does not give them to us.
What the app does NOT collect
- No advertising identifiers. No ad networks. No third-party trackers. The app shows no ads.
- No contacts, photos, microphone, or health data.
- No location when a run is not in progress, beyond the single coarse fix used to find nearby courses.
- Your data is not sold, and it is not shared with data brokers.
Who can see your drives
Your raw route is private. Other drivers never see your GPS trace. What they can see is a ghost — a normalised progress-versus-time curve from a drive that has already finished — and only if you allow it. It is never shown live against another driver. Ghost visibility is yours to set: everyone, friends only, or nobody.
Leaderboards show your username and score — never your finishing time. They never show where you started, where you stopped, or the path you took.
Creating a course is the one exception, and it is deliberate. A custom course is made by recording a drive, so the course line is a road you drove. Anyone who can see the course can see that line — that is what makes it drivable by someone else. You choose who that is when you create it: public, friends only, or private. Think about where you start the recording: a course that begins at your front door tells people where your front door is.
Where it is stored
Account data, runs and scores are stored with Supabase (PostgreSQL and object storage). Raw telemetry is stored as a compressed file readable only by you and by the scoring service. Access is enforced at the database level with row-level security, not by application code alone.
How long it is kept
Runs and scores are kept while your account exists. Raw telemetry is kept so runs can be re-verified and disputes settled; it is not kept indefinitely, and you can delete it with your account at any time.
Deleting your account
In the app: Profile → Delete account. This removes your profile, runs, ghosts, leaderboard entries, friendships, telemetry — including the raw GPS files, not just the records pointing at them — and any course you created that nobody has driven. It is immediate and it is not reversible. You do not have to email anyone or wait for a reply.
One thing survives, and you should know which. If you created a course and other drivers have recorded runs on it, the course stays in the catalog with your name removed from it. Their runs, records and ghosts are their data, not yours, and deleting the road out from under them would erase what they drove. The course keeps no link to you.
Children
Smooooth Operator is for licensed drivers. It is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them.
A game that keeps to your browser
The daily road at smoooothoperator.com/play is a game that runs entirely in your browser. It has no accounts and asks for no personal information.
- Your progress stays on your device. Settings, your best run of each day (and the ghost of it), and your daily streak are kept in your browser's local storage. They are not sent to us. Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes them.
- Moving it to another device is up to you. The stats
panel can pack your daily progress (which days you played, your best
score and tries on each, and a random code for each of your devices)
into a sync link or QR code. It sits after the
#in the link, which browsers never send to a server, and it goes only where you take it. - Ghost links carry the drive, not you. When you share a
run, the drive is encoded in the part of the link after the
#, which browsers do not send to any server. It goes only wherever you choose to send it, with the optional name you set for shared ghosts. - Tilt steering stays in your browser. On a phone or tablet the game reads which way the device is tilted (motion and orientation), so you can steer by turning it; an iPhone asks you first. The readings only turn the wheel, as a key press would, and are never stored or sent anywhere. Pick Slide or Buttons and it doesn't read them at all.
- No location, camera or microphone. The website never asks for them.
- No analytics and no third-party scripts beyond the advertising described below. Fonts and code are served from this site.
- Hosting. The site is served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, it processes your IP address and request details to deliver pages and to protect the site from abuse (Cloudflare's privacy policy).
Advertising
The website — not the app — may show advertising to keep the daily road free. When ads from Google are shown, Google and its partners may use cookies or similar identifiers to serve and measure them and, where you have agreed, to personalise them. Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for that consent through Google's consent message before personalised ads are shown, and can change their choice at any time from the same message.
Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services, or manage your ad preferences in Google's ad settings.
Visitors in US states with their own privacy laws can opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information for advertising: the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link at the foot of the home page and the game page opens Google's opt-out, and the choice is kept for this site.
Google's ad script loads on the home page and the game page, the pages with ad spaces; the other pages carry none. An ad space with nothing to show carries a link to our own app instead.
The iPhone app contains no ads and no ad trackers. Nothing on this website is linked to your app account.
Your rights
You can access, correct, export or delete your data. Deletion is built into the app; for anything else, write to privacy@smoooothoperator.com and we will respond within 30 days. The website keeps nothing about you on our side to export or delete — your game progress is in your own browser.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the app will tell you before the change takes effect.