Privacy policy

Blue Route · last updated 22 October 2026

Blue Route is a navigation app for police, fire and ambulance crews. It’s an independent app, not a police force or emergency service system. It has no accounts, no adverts, no third-party analytics and no tracking. It counts how much it's used, in the way described under “Usage counts” below.

Kept on your phone only

• Your callsign, the boroughs you pick, and your settings.
• Blocks and estates you save.
• The log of your searches and the routes you picked.

None of this is sent anywhere. It stays until you clear the log in the app or uninstall it.

Sent to the Blue Route server, and not kept

To answer a request the app sends the Blue Route server only what that request needs:

• Routes: your current position (and direction of travel, when moving) and the destination’s position.
• Address search: the address you typed. The server looks up house numbers itself, in its own copy of OpenStreetMap, and passes the search to Ordnance Survey’s OS Names API for postcodes, roads and places (and to OS Places too, only on a server set up with it). For speed, the server keeps searches and their answers in memory for up to 24 hours; they’re never written to disk or logged.
• Pursuit mode: your last few positions and direction of travel, to find the road and its speed limit.
• Follow in (team sessions): your position and the colleague’s recent track, to work out the way they drove.

The server works out the answer in memory and keeps nothing: it doesn’t log requests, positions or addresses, and has no database of users. Connections use HTTPS.

Team sessions (only if you start or join one)

In a team, while Blue Route is open, your phone shares your callsign, position and the way you’ve driven in the last two hours with the others in the team, every 15 seconds. It’s encrypted on your phone with a key that’s part of the team code and is never sent to the server, so the server holds only data it can’t read. It keeps that in memory only (a restart forgets it), drops your entry when you leave or a day after you stop sharing, and ends the team after a week. Anyone you give the team code to can see your position, so share it only with colleagues on the job.

Helping improve journey times (only if you turn it on)

Off unless you turn it on in the Session tab. While you navigate, the phone times each road it drives along and keeps only the road’s OpenStreetMap ID, the seconds it took, its length, and whether it was night, rush hour or daytime. The first and last 500 m of every drive are left out. These wait on your phone for at least 6 hours and are then sent mixed with your other drives, with no position, route, time, callsign or device ID. The server adds them to totals per road and discards them; a road’s learned speed is used only once at least 5 drives have been timed on it. Turning it off deletes anything not yet sent.

Usage counts

So we know how many crews use Blue Route, every request to the server carries a random install ID, made on your phone the first time the app runs, and the app's version number. You can reset the ID in the Session tab, after which the app counts as a new install. The app also reports how many navigation and pursuit sessions were started and how many requests got no answer in time, as plain numbers.

The server keeps, for each day: how many different installs it heard from (and on which app versions), how many routes were planned, how many navigation and pursuit sessions were started, and how many requests timed out or failed. To count each install once a day, it keeps a scrambled form of the ID (a hash with a random “salt” made for that day only), and to count it once a week, another (with a salt made for that week only). Neither can be turned back into the ID, and with a new salt each day and each week, one install can't be linked from one day, or week, to the next. Within an hour of a day ending, its totals are saved and its scrambled IDs and salt are deleted; the same when a week ends. Nothing more than a week's worth is ever held. No positions, addresses, searches, callsigns or IP addresses are kept with these counts, and no third-party analytics service is used.

Other services

• Map tiles come from OpenFreeMap. Like any website, it sees your phone’s IP address and which part of the map is being shown.
• TfL: the server reads TfL’s public road closures feed to route around closed roads. Nothing about you or your journeys is sent to TfL.
• Ordnance Survey receives address searches from the server, through its OS Names API (and OS Places, only if the server is set up with it): not your position or anything about you. House-number search runs on the Blue Route server itself.
• App updates come from Expo (expo.dev). When the app opens it asks Expo whether there's a newer version, sending the app's version, the phone's platform and a random ID made for update checks, and like any website it sees the phone's IP address. Nothing about your location, searches or journeys is sent.
• Open in Google Maps / Waze hands the destination to that app when you tap it; their own privacy policies apply.

Location permission

The app asks for your location only while you’re using it, to give journey times and directions from where you are. It doesn’t use location in the background.

Children

Blue Route is meant for emergency-service crews and isn’t directed at children.

Questions

To ask about this policy, email toon-stairs.8u@icloud.com. If this policy changes, the date above changes and the new version is published here.