Many of you have asked questions about data collection and privacy. I took some time to research an accurate response because there are two levels to the answer: -
- What does our privacy policy legally permit us to collect? Thanks to Karsten for posting that above, indeed that is copied directly from the privacy policy that all users accept when signing up to use Mission Control.
- What data do we actually collect & why do we collect it? In practice we collect different data at different moments in time - I’ll split this into ride data and bike technical data.
Ride Data. If you don’t record a ride, we don’t collect or store anything about your ride or location.
WHAT: If you DO record the ride, we create a .fit file on your phone and then back this up on our cloud servers – just like Strava does, for example. The .fit file format was originally developed by Garmin and interested users can do further research online.
WHY: Simply put, riders told us that if they recorded rides via Mission Control they
expected us to back them up. One of the largest complaints we had from previous Mission Control users was that if they deleted the app or lost/upgraded their phone all of their rides disappeared. Therefore a key design feature for us with a newer app was to store rides for our riders so that they will never lose them - even if they change phones.
Bike technical data.
WHAT: Our bikes collect & store limited technical data on-board, Mission Control accesses these logs and uploads key product engineering data to our cloud-servers in three scenarios. 1) When you change any parameters on the Mission Control tuning screen. 2) If you open any of the Diagnostic screens. 3) If the bike has an error state.
WHY: We want to understand how our bikes are performing in the field, how riders are using them and what is going wrong. We also wanted to equip our Rider-care and Retail service teams with the ability to see historical fault data, in case an error is intermittent. Our sole aim here is to make better products, create happier riders and sell more bikes in the process.