A head's up for anyone using Gaia or thinking about it. First, price. It went up to $60/year. Outside is really working to milk that cow ... which would be fine except that there's a new privacy policy. It's very intrusive and you can't opt out. It accompanies the new update I was forced to load. The one that requires me to log in to Outside online before it will work. So they can track me better. I found out just before my last trip, too late to replace it, as I went to enter waypoints. Plus my subscription renewal is in April. Okay, I'll work around it by giving it access to location only when the app is active. No problem. I'm on an iPhone 14 FWIW. I do my trip and it works well, as always. Since we're out of cell range, I have my phone in airplane mode the whole time to save the battery. Home from my trip and I notice that the battery in my phone is draining too quickly. Like 60% to 30% overnight too quickly. When I start digging into the problem, I found something infuriating. The fücking app is waking itself up every hour, accessing my location, and then accessing the web. No, it's not running in background. Last night I ran a test by setting the app permission for location to "never" and woke up to a phone that had the same charge as when I went to bed. No accessing location. No web traffic. It's tracking my phone in a very dishonest way. God knows what other information it's scraping from my phone.
So what? Isn't that SOP? A free app? Sure, you are the product. To charge a premium and then track on the sly to sell my private information is utter ******. I'm paying for the app. For that price I expect a bit of privacy. Or at least the option for it. Or at least up front complete and clear honesty. Yes, I read the privacy policy. It's horrible and typical of the genre. No, I didn't see where the app would start itself up without permission, although it's probably buried in there somewhere. At this point I don't trust them as far as I can spit a live rat. One that's clinging to my face for dear life. I'm shopping for a new GPS navigation app for offroad. I'm open to suggestions. Carplay would be nice but I can live without it. I have to have offline maps. Gaia is gone sometime before April. Fück them.
At a minimum, if you use Gaia, set the app permission to "never" anytime you're not actually in the woods if you care about privacy or about battery life. If you care about anyone knowing where you're going in the woods, leave your phone at home. But you know that.
So what? Isn't that SOP? A free app? Sure, you are the product. To charge a premium and then track on the sly to sell my private information is utter ******. I'm paying for the app. For that price I expect a bit of privacy. Or at least the option for it. Or at least up front complete and clear honesty. Yes, I read the privacy policy. It's horrible and typical of the genre. No, I didn't see where the app would start itself up without permission, although it's probably buried in there somewhere. At this point I don't trust them as far as I can spit a live rat. One that's clinging to my face for dear life. I'm shopping for a new GPS navigation app for offroad. I'm open to suggestions. Carplay would be nice but I can live without it. I have to have offline maps. Gaia is gone sometime before April. Fück them.
At a minimum, if you use Gaia, set the app permission to "never" anytime you're not actually in the woods if you care about privacy or about battery life. If you care about anyone knowing where you're going in the woods, leave your phone at home. But you know that.
