Why Backpackers Friend Has Zero Trackers — and How to Check Any Hiking App Yourself

A note from the developer · July 2026

This week a thru-hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail opened the settings of one of the most popular navigation apps in backpacking and found a toggle that had been quietly switched on the whole time: Facebook conversion tracking, on by default. The app's own description explained that it uses the data “to help us measure the return on investment of Facebook Ads.” The hiker's reaction stuck with me: not happy this has been silently enabled for the past 1,800 miles of my hike.

I want to be fair here. What that app is doing is legal, it's extremely common, and it's baked into the default toolkit that most apps are built with. It's not a scandal. But it is a choice — and it's the exact choice I made the opposite way when I built Backpackers Friend. So instead of piling on, I'd rather do something more useful: tell you precisely what my app does and doesn't do with your data, and then show you how to check any hiking app on your own phone in about two minutes, mine included.

The problem What “shares your data with Facebook” actually means

When an app says it does Facebook (or Google, or any ad network) conversion tracking, here's the plain-English version of what's happening. The app includes a small piece of software — an advertising SDK — from that ad company. As you use the app, that SDK phones home: which screens you opened, what you tapped, sometimes a device identifier that can be matched back to your other accounts. The ad company uses it to figure out which of its ads led you to install and pay, and to build a profile it can target you with later. It's not that anyone is reading your trip notes. It's that your behavior becomes someone else's marketing data — by default, without you opting in.

For a hiking app, that stings a little more than most. This is the app that knows where you camped, which trailheads you searched, when you were miles from a road, and how far you walked. That's not the kind of thing I ever wanted flowing to an ad exchange.

The choice What Backpackers Friend sends — and what it doesn't

Backpackers Friend is built on a single principle: the app is yours, and it runs on your phone. There is no account to create, no server that stores your trips, and no login screen — because there's no back end for you to log into. Every trip, route, waypoint, gear list, and recorded hike lives in a database on your device. I couldn't hand your trip history to an advertiser if I wanted to, because I never have it in the first place.

Now the honest other half — because “we send nothing, ever” would be a lie, and you should be suspicious of any app that claims it. A navigation app has to reach the internet for a few specific, boring things. Here's the complete list of what leaves your phone, and why:

That's the whole picture. Map data in, no behavior data out. None of those requests carry an advertising identity, and none of them include your trip contents. The difference between this and a default ad SDK isn't subtle — it's the difference between an app asking “what does the trail look like here?” and an app telling a third party “here's what this person just did.”

Map data in. No behavior data out. The app that knows where you camped shouldn't be the app that tells an ad network about it.

The tool How to check any hiking app yourself in two minutes

Don't take my word for any of this — and don't take any app's word for it either. Apple gives you two built-in ways to check what an app really does, and they work on every app in the store, including mine. Learn these once and you'll never be at the mercy of a marketing page again.

1. Read the App Store privacy label before you install.

1. Open the app's App Store page and scroll down to the App Privacy section.
2. Look for a heading called Data Used to Track You. This is the big one — it means data is being linked to you across other companies' apps and websites for advertising. The strongest possible answer here is that the section doesn't appear at all.
3. Check Data Linked to You and Data Collected. An app that lists “Data Not Collected” is telling Apple, under threat of removal, that it gathers nothing about you.

2. Watch what an already-installed app is allowed to do.

1. Open Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. Any app that has asked to track you across other apps shows up here — and you can switch it off. (Better yet, toggle off “Allow Apps to Request to Track” to deny it globally.)
2. In Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services, check that a hiking app only has location access “While Using” or “Always” for a reason you understand — background GPS for tracking a hike is legitimate; a flashlight app asking for it is not.
3. Scroll to the bottom of Location Services and open System Services to see how location is being used under the hood.

Run that on Backpackers Friend and you'll find the privacy label boring in the best possible way, and nothing waiting for you in the Tracking list. Run it on the other apps on your phone and you may be surprised who shows up. Either way, you'll know — and knowing is the entire point.

The reason Why I built it this way

I didn't leave the trackers out to make a marketing point. I left them out because I built this app for the same trips you take — multi-day trips into places with no signal, where the phone in your pocket is the map, the compass, and the record of where you've been. Out there, the app has to work with zero connectivity and total self-reliance. An app designed to constantly phone home to an ad network is, quietly, an app designed around always being online. Building for the backcountry and building for surveillance point in opposite directions, and I chose the backcountry.

The nice side effect is that I can tell you the truth in one sentence: your trips are yours, they stay on your phone, and nobody — not Facebook, not me — is watching where you walk.