Last updated: 19 September 2026
The Offroad SOS mobile app and website (the "Service") are operated by Offroad SOS Portal, a sole establishment registered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (trade licence no. 1633971), which is the data controller for the personal data described below ("Offroad SOS", "we", "us"). The Service helps off-road and outdoor enthusiasts call for assistance, plan trips, and connect in communities. This policy explains what we collect, why, and your choices. Questions, or to exercise your rights: support@offroadsos.ai.
| Category | Examples | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account & profile | Name, email, phone number, password (hashed), date of birth, avatar & vehicle photo, profile bio/“about” text, vehicle type, account role | Create and secure your account; show your identity to people you interact with; date of birth is used to confirm you meet our minimum age (18) and is not shown to other users |
| Precise location | GPS coordinates while you use the app | Send SOS alerts to nearby helpers, show trips by distance, and share live location with an active rescue party / trip |
| Approximate location (SOS) | Your position shifted to a random spot within 5 km, saved once when you raise an SOS | Let nearby helpers see roughly where help is needed without revealing where you are |
| Approximate location (offering help) | Your position shifted by up to ~500 m, saved once when you offer to help someone | Show the requester roughly where help is coming from, so they can choose whom to accept |
| User content | SOS details, trip details, photos & videos, chat messages, direct (1:1) messages, community posts & the location you set for a community (city, region, country and its coordinates, from a place you search), ratings | Provide the core features you use — including showing communities near you and letting you message other members directly |
| Community ratings | After a community trip, that community's admins may rate members — a 1–5 score and a category (e.g. convoy, comms, safety), with no written comments. You can see your own overall rating; the community's admins can see the detail. | Support trip safety and community quality |
| Emergency contact | Name, phone, email of a contact you add | Notify them when you raise an SOS (only when you enable it) |
| Trip Guardian | A person the trip organizer designates to watch over a trip (they do not join it) | Alert them if a trip member raises an SOS, so they can respond — they see the rescue only after an SOS is raised, the same as an accepted helper. (A separate “live watch” option, shown clearly to every participant, may later let a Guardian see the trip’s live map.) |
| Device & notifications | Push notification token, device/OS type, app version | Deliver push notifications and diagnose issues |
| Website visits (www.offroadsos.ai only) | Page viewed, referring site, campaign tag in the link you followed, browser/OS type, and the country/city derived from your IP address — the IP address itself is discarded after that lookup. No cookies; a temporary session id that disappears when you close the tab. Not collected if your browser sends Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control. | Understand which pages and campaigns bring people to the site. Processed by Microsoft Azure Application Insights in the UAE (uaenorth) |
| Usage & diagnostics | Feature usage, when you last used the app, error/crash logs | Keep the Service reliable and secure, and understand how it is used in aggregate (for example how many people are active each week). We do not build individual behaviour profiles. |
| Feature requests & votes | The text of a feature idea you post, and your votes, on the in-app feedback board | Product feedback and roadmap. These are shown publicly to other users (without your name) |
| Bug reports | The message you write, basic device/app diagnostics, and an optional screenshot you attach | Support and debugging. Emailed to our support team, and used to fix the issue — including with the help of AI-assisted triage on a privacy-minimised copy (your identity removed; a screenshot is only included after our team reviews it and confirms it contains no personal information) |
Under the UAE Personal Data Protection Law (Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021) we must have a lawful basis for each purpose. Ours are:
| What we process | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Account & profile, sign-in identifiers | Create and secure your account; show your identity to people you interact with | Performance of the service you asked for, and your consent |
| Precise location and approximate (fuzzed) location | Send SOS alerts to nearby helpers, rank trips by distance, share live position within an active rescue or trip | Your explicit consent — this is sensitive data, and you can withdraw it (see section 10) |
| SOS details, trip and community content, chat and direct messages | Provide the features you use | Performance of the service, and your consent |
| Emergency contact you nominate | Alert them when you raise an SOS, if you enable it | Your consent — you confirm you may share their details |
| Community member ratings | Trip safety and community quality | Legitimate interest, data-minimised (scores only, no free text) |
| Device tokens & push | Deliver notifications you have opted into | Your consent, and legitimate interest in delivering the service |
| Usage & diagnostics, error logs | Keep the Service reliable and secure; prevent abuse; aggregate usage statistics | Legitimate interest |
| Bug reports you submit | Support and debugging | Your consent (you choose to send them) |
| Subscription status & purchase events | Provide and manage a paid membership (Summit/Partner) | Performance of your contract with us |
Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time — see Your rights. Withdrawing consent for location will stop SOS and distance features working, because they cannot function without it.
Location is collected only while the app is in use (foreground); we do not track your location in the background. Precise location is used to dispatch SOS alerts, rank trips by distance, and—during an active rescue or live trip—share your position with the relevant party. You can disable location in your device settings, though SOS and distance features will not work.
Before a rescue is agreed, both sides see only an approximate position. When you raise an SOS, nearby helpers do not see where you are. They see a point picked at random within 5 km of you, and a 5 km circle drawn around it — you are somewhere inside that circle, but not at its centre. The distance their app shows is measured to that random point, not to you. The same protection applies to helpers: when you offer to help someone, the requester sees roughly where you are so they can choose whom to accept, again to within roughly half a kilometre. Exact coordinates are shared only once the requester accepts you into the rescue party, and only with that party. The approximate position is calculated once, when you offer, so it cannot be narrowed down by watching it change.
Situation photos are shown to nearby helpers. When you raise an SOS, the photos you attach to describe your situation are visible to nearby helpers before they offer to help, so they can decide whether they are able to assist. Treat these photos as public: don’t include anything you would not want seen — license plates, faces, house numbers, or landmarks that reveal exactly where you are. The app reminds you of this each time you add photos. Your exact location, private notes, and phone number are never shared this way — only with a rescue party you accept.
If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your name and email to create your account. We request only the minimum scopes (openid email profile) and do not access any other Google or Apple data. We also store the stable identifier your provider gives us for your sign-in, so your account stays linked to it. Because that identifier — not your email — links your account, your email for a Google or Apple account is managed by that provider and is shown as read-only in the app.
We keep personal data only as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for.
| Data | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Account & profile | While your account is active |
| Live rescue location trail (the stream of positions shared during an active rescue) | Automatically deleted within 48 hours. A scheduled job purges it daily — we do not keep a history of where you have been. |
| Trip route trail (the positions — with altitude, speed and direction of travel — recorded while you are in a live trip, used for the trip's route replay and GPX export) | Kept with the trip so members can replay the route; deleted when the trip is deleted or when you delete your account. |
| SOS records — the incident, who helped, and the precise location | The precise location is kept for 24 months after the rescue is closed, then permanently removed — the record itself remains as your rescue history, showing only the approximate (5 km) location. We keep it for that period so that you and the people who helped you have a record of what happened, so we can investigate a dispute or a misuse of the SOS feature, so we can establish or defend legal claims, and so we can respond to lawful requests from authorities. |
| Trip & community content, chat and direct messages, media | While your account is active, or until you delete the item |
| Backups and server logs | Purged on our routine cycle, within 90 days |
| Records we must keep by law (e.g. for legal, security or fraud-prevention reasons) | Only for the minimum period required |
You can delete your account in-app (Profile → Delete account) or by emailing us. On deletion we remove or anonymize your personal information (e.g., your name becomes "Deleted user" and your email is scrubbed); some content may be retained in anonymized form to preserve the integrity of other members' trip and rescue history. See our Account & Data Deletion page.
Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS). Passwords are hashed. Access to production systems is restricted. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure.
The Service is for adults. You must be 18 or over to create an account, and we check date of birth at sign-up. The Service is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact us and we will delete it.
Under the UAE PDPL you have the following rights. To use any of them, email support@offroadsos.ai from your account address unless an in-app route is listed. We respond within 30 days, and there is no charge.
| Right | What it means | How |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Get a copy of the personal data we hold about you | In-app export, or email us |
| Correction | Fix data that is wrong or incomplete | Edit your profile in-app, or email us |
| Deletion / erasure | Have your account and personal data removed | Profile → Delete account, or email us |
| Portability | Receive your data in a machine-readable format | In-app export, or email us |
| Withdraw consent | Stop processing that relies on your consent — including location. You can also switch location off in your device settings at any time, which stops collection immediately. | Device settings, or email us |
| Restrict or object | Ask us to stop or limit a specific use of your data while keeping your account | Email us, telling us which processing you object to |
| Complain | Raise a concern with us, or escalate to the regulator | See section 15 |
Withdrawing consent does not affect processing we carried out before you withdrew it. Some rights are limited where we must keep data by law, or where removing it would affect another person's records — we will tell you if that applies.
We host in Microsoft Azure (UAE North region). Some data is processed by providers outside the UAE — in particular, your phone number is sent to Twilio or Google (Firebase Authentication) (SMS verification), account emails to Microsoft Azure Communication Services, and, when you use the map, your IP address and the map area you view are sent to Esri, and any place you search for is also sent to Esri (via our servers); and, if you take out a paid membership, your subscription events are processed by RevenueCat (account identifier + purchase events, not payment-card data) — with appropriate safeguards. Your data may also be processed in other countries where our providers operate.
When you raise an SOS, our servers automatically work out which nearby helpers to alert, based on distance and the receive-radius each helper has set. This is automated, but it only decides who sees an alert — it produces no legal or similarly significant effect for you, and no person is accepted, rejected, scored or profiled by it. Every decision about who joins your rescue party is made by you. We do not carry out automated decision-making of the kind that would require a separate right of review, and we do not profile you for advertising.
To keep the community safe, we use an automated content-safety check (Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety, running in the same UAE North region as our servers) to detect hateful, sexual, violent or self-harm content. It is applied to:
Flagged content is recorded for review by our team, and repeated flags may lead to an account being reviewed. This check is never applied to emergency SOS or rescue messages, or to the photos attached to them — an emergency must never be blocked or delayed by moderation. Videos are not checked. You can ask a person to review any action taken — see section 10.
We have assessed whether a Data Protection Officer is required and concluded that one is not mandatory for this Service: location is recorded per trip, with your explicit consent, and activated by you — it is not continuous or large-scale systematic monitoring, and we do not carry out high-risk profiling. Privacy questions go to support@offroadsos.ai, which reaches the controller directly. We will re-assess if the Service changes.
We may receive requests for user data from law enforcement, courts, or regulators — in the UAE this would typically be Dubai Police, the Public Prosecution, or the UAE Data Office. How we handle them:
We do not sell data to, or volunteer data to, any authority.
Contact us first. Email support@offroadsos.ai with the subject "Privacy complaint". We will acknowledge within 5 working days and respond substantively within 30 days.
Escalating. If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the UAE Data Office (the federal supervisory authority established under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021), which can be reached through the UAE Government portal at u.ae. Complaining to us first is not a precondition — you may go to the regulator directly.
The rights in section 10 and the complaint route in section 15 are offered to every user, wherever you are. This section adds the disclosures required in particular countries. Where a local rule gives you more than this policy does, the local rule applies. The Service is currently offered on the app stores of the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United States and Australia.
Egypt is served from the same systems as the UAE: your data is stored in Microsoft Azure's UAE North region, which means that using the Service transfers your personal data from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates, and to the providers listed in section 11. We rely on your consent for that transfer, and on the safeguards in our contracts with those providers. Egypt's Personal Data Protection Law (Law No. 151 of 2020) gives you rights of access, correction, erasure, objection and withdrawal of consent — all of which are the rights in section 10, and you use them the same way. Complaints may be raised with us first (section 15) or with the Egyptian data-protection authority established under that law.
For residents of US states with consumer-privacy laws (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Maryland and others):
For users in Australia, under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles:
For users in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the Personal Data Protection Law (Royal Decree M/19 of 1443H, as amended) and its Implementing and Data Transfer Regulations:
For users in Qatar, under Law No. 13 of 2016 on the Protection of Personal Data Privacy:
For users in the Kingdom of Bahrain, under Law No. 30 of 2018 with respect to Personal Data Protection:
For users in the Sultanate of Oman, under the Personal Data Protection Law (Royal Decree 6/2022) and its Executive Regulation:
For users in the State of Kuwait: Kuwait has no general personal-data law; the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority's Data Privacy Protection Regulation applies to providers of communication and information-technology services. Whether or not it binds us directly, we apply the same protections described in this policy:
The Service is not currently offered on the Canadian app stores. This section continues to apply to users in Canada who installed the app earlier.
For users in Canada, under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, in Quebec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (as amended by Law 25):
We may update this policy; we will revise the "Last updated" date and, for material changes, notify you in-app.
Offroad SOS Portal — Dubai, United Arab Emirates — support@offroadsos.ai
Our full registered address is available on request.
© 2026 Offroad SOS Portal. All rights reserved.