Privacy

Justin Clarke-Salt

Effective Date: August 12, 2026

Next3Trains has no accounts and no sign-in. It never asks for your name, email address or phone number, and it holds nothing that identifies you personally. There are no analytics SDKs, no crash reporting SDKs, and no advertising networks in the app at all.

What follows is a plain description of the small amount of information that does leave your device, and why.

INFORMATION COLLECTION

If you don’t turn on push notifications, the only thing that leaves your device is the pair of station codes for a route, which is sent to the National Rail API to fetch train times. Nothing is stored anywhere, and nothing identifies you.

If you do turn on push notifications, the app needs a small amount of information stored on back-end infrastructure so that it knows what to send you and when. That record contains:

  • A push notification identifier for your device. This is what allows a notification to reach your device, and it’s a random identifier not tied to you personally. It does not tell me who you are, but it is persistent, so I treat it as personal data.
  • The app version and build number you are running.
  • The routes you have configured, and which of them you have assigned to your morning and evening commutes.
  • Your commuting days, and your morning and evening commuting hours.
  • Your notification preferences, including your chosen delay threshold.
  • Whether certain settings are enabled - for example whether you use widgets, and whether you have granted the app location access.
  • If you use Live Activities, a separate push identifier for each running Live Activity, along with the specific trains it is tracking.
  • A short-lived record of which disrupted trains you have already been told about, so you aren’t notified twice about the same thing. These records are deleted after four hours.

Taken together this describes your regular commute - which stations, on which days, at roughly what times. It doesn’t say who you are, but please be aware of what it amounts to before you turn notifications on.

LOCATION

Your location never leaves your device. No coordinates are transmitted or stored anywhere.

However, if you have granted the app location access and have notifications enabled, some values derived from your location are stored with the rest of your notification record: whether you granted “Always” permission, which of your saved routes you are currently nearest to, and a flag indicating that you appear to be more than 100 miles from any of your saved stations (which is used to stop sending you commute alerts while you’re away). These are the nearest-route and travel-mode features described in the app FAQs.

DATA RETENTION

  • Your notification record is deleted as soon as you turn notifications off in the app.
  • If the app hasn’t been opened for 30 days, I assume you’ve deleted the app and your data is deleted automatically.
  • The short-lived record of notifications already sent to you is deleted after four hours.

WHERE IT IS STORED

The back-end runs on Google Cloud infrastructure in the europe-west2 (London) region.

THIRD-PARTY SERVICES

The app does not use third-party analytics, crash reporting, or advertising networks. The services involved are:

  • Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Run, Cloud Logging) - stores the notification record described above and delivers push notifications.
  • Apple (Apple Push Notification service) - delivers push notifications and Live Activity updates to your device.
  • Rail Delivery Group / Rail Data Marketplace - provides the National Rail departure data. Requests to this service contain only station codes, and are shared across all users asking about the same route, so it receives nothing that could identify an individual user.

CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

Next3Trains does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under the age of 13.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

If I make changes to this privacy policy, I will update the “Effective Date” above.

CONTACT

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or you want the record for your device deleted, you can contact me via the Contact form above. Turning notifications off in the app deletes it immediately in any case.