Privacy policy

Last updated: 4 November 2026.

Taper exists to read your training honestly, and that only works if we treat your data honestly too. This page says what we collect, why, and what control you have, in plain words. The short version: we collect what the product needs, we sell nothing, and you can delete everything yourself.

What we collect

Your email address and name, used to sign you in. If you connect Strava, we also receive the name on your Strava profile and keep it with the connection. Your runs and other activities, imported from the services you connect - that includes distance, time, pace, heart rate, laps, cadence and the other measurements your watch records, the route you ran (GPS coordinates), and the second-by-second traces behind the charts. Plus the training plans, workouts, notes and corrections you create in Taper.

Where the service you connect sends it, we also import your daily wellness figures: sleep, heart rate variability, resting heart rate and body weight. Taper reads those to work out whether you are recovered, which is the readiness figure on your Home screen. Nothing in Taper needs them, so a provider that does not send them costs you only that reading, and you can delete them the same way you delete anything else - see Your control, below.

If you connect parkrun, we also read your public parkrun results - your official finish times and the events you ran - and match them to your runs.

Connecting Garmin, COROS, Strava or intervals.icu

Strava, intervals.icu and COROS connect the usual way: you approve Taper on their site and we hold the access key they issue us. COROS brings in your runs and, if your watch records them, your sleep, resting heart rate and heart rate variability, and takes your plan out to the watch; disconnecting in Profile clears that plan from COROS and deletes the key.

Strava can also be written to. If you turn it on in Profile, or press "Push to Strava" on a run, Taper writes a title and description of that run onto your Strava activity, in the style you chose and after you have seen it. It never clears anything you wrote yourself, and it is off until you switch it on.

Garmin connects on Garmin's own page. Taper sends you to Garmin, you sign in there, and you choose what Taper may see: your activities, your daily health stats, and whether Taper may send training to your watch. Taper never sees your Garmin password. We keep the access Garmin gives us and the identifier Garmin knows you by, on our server, readable only by the Taper application. Disconnecting in Profile, or deleting your account, tells Garmin and deletes them, and you can take Taper's access back from your Garmin account at any time.

Through that connection Taper receives, as Garmin sends them, the activities and daily health stats you allowed (your runs, resting heart rate, sleep and heart rate variability), and, because you allowed training on Garmin's page, sends your planned workouts to your watch until you switch that off in Profile. They are shown only to you, in Taper. We do not sell them, we do not send them to an assistant you connect, and we never use them to train, test or improve any AI model. They stay in your Taper account until you delete them, as runs from any other service do.

Connecting parkrun

parkrun is simpler than any of them, because it publishes every athlete's results as a public page. There is nothing to sign in to and no password: you give us your barcode (your parkrun ID) and we read that public page to bring in your official finish times. In the Taper app your own phone fetches the page directly. Disconnecting in Profile forgets your barcode.

Connecting Health Connect

In the Android app you can let Taper read your runs from Health Connect, the phone's own health store. Taper asks for three read permissions, exercise sessions, distance and heart rate, and reads only running sessions, only when you tap Read my runs, and only the last 90 days. What it keeps is the run's summary: when, how far, how long, average and peak heart rate, and which app recorded it. It never writes to Health Connect, never reads anything else there, and never passes what it read to anyone. You can take the permissions back in Health Connect at any time; deleting a run in Taper, or your account, removes what was read.

Adding runs from files

If you use Run files in Profile, you choose a .fit file from your watch, or the zip Garmin sends when you ask for your data, and Taper reads it on our server. It keeps the runs in it, with the same measurements as any other run, and nothing else: the daily monitoring, sleep and other files in a Garmin export are looked at to see what they are and then dropped. The file is deleted as soon as it has been read, and a half-sent file is cleared automatically once it is a day old. A run Taper already has is not added twice.

What we use it for

To run the product: building your plan, working out your paces and predictions, and showing you your own history. Where you turn it on, we send planned workouts to your watch or calendar. We do not run ads, we do not sell or share your data with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not use your data to train AI models.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Your account, your activities and the plans built from them: because you asked us to run this service for you, and there is no service without them. Heart rate and the fitness measures worked out from it are health data, which the law treats more carefully than the rest, and so are the wellness figures above: your sleep, your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate and your weight. Taper holds those because you connected a provider that sends them, and you can stop that at any time by disconnecting it, which is also how you withdraw. You can delete what has already come in, along with the rest of your imported data, from Profile.

How long we keep it

For as long as you have an account. Deleting your account removes it immediately from the live database, and deleting individual activities works the same way. The nightly backups above keep their copies for up to about six months, so something you delete can remain in an old backup until that backup is replaced. We do not delete dormant accounts on a schedule today; if that changes, this page will say so before it starts.

Who else sees any of it

Five services, all narrowly. Three whenever you use Taper:

• Brevo sends your sign-in codes and, if you turn it on, your weekly recap email, so it processes your email address and what that email says about your week.
• Open-Meteo tells us what the weather was on a run, so we send it the start coordinates and date of that run - no name, no email, nothing identifying you.
• CARTO draws the map background behind your route, and works differently from Brevo and Open-Meteo above: your browser fetches the map squares from CARTO directly, so they see your IP address and which part of the world you are looking at, and it only happens on a run with a route, when you open it. We send them nothing ourselves and they get no name, no email and none of your training.

Two only if you switch reminders on, and they are how a notification physically reaches your phone:

• In the Android app from Google Play, Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is Google's. It gets an anonymous handle for your device, and it does see the wording, which names your session, or says that a file you added has been read and how many runs it brought.
• In a browser or the Home Screen app, whichever push service your browser uses - Apple's for Safari, Google's for Chrome, Mozilla's for Firefox. It also gets an anonymous handle for your device, but a browser push is encrypted before it leaves our server, so the push service carries the reminder without being able to read it.

Neither push service gets your email address, your name or your training history. Turning reminders off in Profile stops it and deletes the handle. That is the whole list of services Taper sends an athlete's data to.

An assistant you connect is not on that list. In Profile you can let Claude or ChatGPT read your plan, races, runs, progress, zones and settings by approving it on a consent screen, with two exceptions: a run that reached Taper only through Strava is passed to it as a placeholder without its figures, and nothing that came through Garmin's own connection is passed to it at all, because those services' terms do not allow it. It is your assistant asking Taper, not Taper sending: nothing leaves unless that assistant asks on your behalf. It can also make any change you could make in the app, including deleting runs and races, but only after it has shown you the change and you have said yes in the conversation. Every change is logged, and most can be undone; filing your plan away or starting a new one, disconnecting a service, resetting your data and deleting your account cannot. Resetting your data or deleting your account also needs you to type the exact phrase it names. Disconnecting it in Profile ends its access at once. What the assistant then does with what it read is governed by its own provider's terms, not ours.

Where it lives

On a server that Taper rents from Hetzner, in the EU, which hosts it for us and has no other use of it. It is not a third-party analytics platform. Each night an encrypted copy of the whole server is sent to Backblaze, in its EU data centre, as a backup. The copy is encrypted on our server before it leaves, so Backblaze cannot read it, and it is used only to restore Taper if something goes wrong.

Your control

You can disconnect any provider at any time from your Profile. Disconnecting Strava removes the runs that reached Taper only through Strava, as Strava's terms require; a run your watch also sent stays. You can delete your imported activities, or your whole account, from Profile; deletion takes effect immediately in the live database. Anything already sent to your watch or calendar is removed where we can still reach it. You can download a copy of your data from Profile (Export my data). If anything here is unclear, email info@taperapp.co.uk and a human will answer.

Your calendar feed. If you turn on the calendar feed in Profile, Taper gives you a private address that serves your plan, and Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or whichever calendar you add it to fetches your sessions from it. Taper sends nothing to them; your calendar asks. Anyone who has the address can read your plan, so treat it like a password. Turning the feed off in Profile stops the address working at once.

The law gives you more than that, and none of it needs a reason: a copy of what we hold, correction of anything wrong, deletion, your data in a portable form, and the right to object to or restrict what we do with it. Ask at the same address. If we get it wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and you do not have to raise it with us first.

Cookies and what your browser keeps

One cookie, to keep you signed in. No tracking or advertising cookies, and no third-party analytics.

The welcome page counts visitors with a same-day hash of your connection, kept as a number only.

Taper also keeps a few things in your browser's own storage rather than on our server: your units, your light or dark choice, which notices you have dismissed, and a half-finished plan builder so a refresh does not lose it. None of it leaves your device, none of it identifies you, and clearing your browser data removes all of it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app rather than bury it here.