Privacy policy

What we collect

RunVibe is a public directory. It does not offer user accounts, subscriptions, payments, newsletters, or reviews. We do not ask you to create a profile or provide personal information simply to browse.

Like most websites, the infrastructure used to deliver and secure RunVibe may process technical information such as IP address, browser and device details, pages requested, and the time of a request in server logs. If you choose to email us, we receive the information in that message.

Listing a club

The one form on the site is “list your run club”. It asks about the club — its name, city, meeting spot, schedule and a link — and nothing about you that we need. Your email address is optional, is used only to ask a follow-up question about the club you told us about, and is never published, sold, or added to a mailing list. There is nothing to sign up for.

To stop automated submissions we store a one-way, salted hash of the IP address a submission came from, and count how many arrived from it in the last hour. The address itself is not stored, and the hash cannot be turned back into one. If you would like a submission you sent removed, email us and say which club it was.

How we use information

We use technical information to operate, protect, troubleshoot, and improve the site, and we use messages you send to respond to you. We do not sell or rent personal information, and we do not use information from your visit for targeted advertising.

Cookies and analytics

RunVibe sets no cookies, and uses no advertising or cross-site tracking technology. Our hosting providers may use strictly necessary technology and logs to deliver and secure the service. Your browser's session storage holds the approximate location described below and whether you have hidden it; both are cleared when you close the tab.

We do count how often people leave RunVibe for a club — when you click through to a club's website, its social page, or directions to its meeting spot, we record that one of those links was clicked, which club it belonged to, and which page you were on. That is how we know whether a listing is any use to the club it describes.

Those counts are anonymous and cannot be traced back to you. We do not store your IP address, a hash of it, a cookie, a device identifier, or anything else that would let us recognise you across pages or visits, so there is no way to reconstruct one person's path through the site.

We also use Plausible Analytics to see how many people visit and which pages they find useful. Plausible is a privacy-focused service that sets no cookies, collects no personal data, and builds no profile of anyone: it counts visits, pages, and the site that referred you, all in aggregate. It stores its data in the EU and never shares or sells it. We serve it from runvibe.co rather than from Plausible's own domain, so your browser makes no request to a third-party analytics host while you are here.

Because neither of these stores anything on your device or identifies you, RunVibe has no cookie banner to show you and nothing for you to consent to or opt out of. If we ever add advertising or accounts, we will update this policy before or when that change takes effect.

Approximate location

A metro page lists every city in that metro, and the search box can offer any of the 94 we cover — neither of which is much help if you don't know the area. To offer a “cities near you” shortcut on a metro page, and to put the nearest ones at the top of the search box before you type anything, your browser makes one request to GeoJS (get.geojs.io), a free lookup service that estimates a rough location from the IP address the request comes from. We never ask for GPS, and we never see or store your location: the estimate is used in your browser to reorder links that are already on the page, and it is kept in your browser's session storage so the lookup happens once per visit rather than on every page.

This is an estimate, not a fix on you — the service reports its own accuracy as a radius of roughly twenty kilometres, which in a large metro covers several suburbs. Wherever it appears we show what it guessed and a “Hide this” control that turns the shortcut off everywhere for the rest of your session. The request is only made once you open the search box or land on a metro page, so if you never do, it never happens. Blocking it, or turning JavaScript off, removes the feature and changes nothing else — the full list of cities is part of the page itself.

GeoJS receives your IP address as part of that request, as any server you connect to does, and its privacy practices are its own.

What we do with what you search for

Searching RunVibe writes nothing to our database. The list of cities, neighborhoods and clubs is downloaded to your browser once, and the matching happens there, so what you type as you type it never leaves your device.

There is one exception, and it is deliberate. When a search finds nothing at all, we send the words you searched for to Plausible, so we know which city to add next — a directory can only find out what it is missing from the people who went looking. We send it only after you have stopped typing, only for searches with no results, and only when what you typed still looks like a place name: anything unusually long, or containing a run of digits, is dropped rather than sent. Nothing accompanies it — no cookie, no identifier, nothing that connects one search to another or to you — so it is a word on a list, not a record of a person.

Searches that do find something are not recorded anywhere.

Sharing and links

We use service providers, including Railway, to host the website and database. They process information only as needed to provide their services. RunVibe also links to club websites, social profiles, and other third-party services. Their privacy practices are their own, so review their policies before sharing information with them.

Retention and security

We keep information only for as long as reasonably needed to operate, secure, and support RunVibe, or as required by law. No internet service can promise absolute security, but we use reasonable safeguards appropriate to the information we handle.

Your choices and questions

You can limit technical information by adjusting your browser or device settings. For privacy questions or requests concerning information you have provided to RunVibe, email privacy@runvibe.co.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as RunVibe changes. The date at the top identifies the most recent revision.