Privacy policy
Effective 15 September 2026
In short: Wanted Level does not collect, store, share or sell any information about you. There are no accounts, ads, analytics or tracking. Your location is used on your phone to work out your wanted level and is never sent to us or anyone else.
Your location
With your permission, Wanted Level reads your phone's location to show how heavily cycling tickets are written around you. The calculation happens entirely on your phone, against data that ships inside the app.
If you turn on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island display (iPhone) or the badge over other apps (Android), the app keeps reading your location while that display is on, including when Wanted Level is closed or not in use, so the stars stay current while you ride. It stops when you turn the display off. On iPhone the system shows a location indicator while this is happening; on Android an ongoing notification says so.
Your location is not saved to any file, not uploaded, and not shared. You can refuse or withdraw location permission at any time in your phone's settings; you can still drag the map to look around without it.
Your phone's own location services, provided by Apple or Google, determine your position under their own terms.
The map
To draw the map, the app downloads map images and styles from OpenFreeMap, built from OpenStreetMap data. As with any request on the internet, those servers can see your IP address and which area of the map is being loaded. We do not receive that information. Map requests are not linked to you by us in any way.
The summons data
The ticketing data comes from the NYPD's public summons records on NYC Open Data. It is built into the app as counts by location and hour, and contains no information about the people ticketed.
Links
Links in the app (to this site, to NYC Open Data or to open-source projects) open in your browser, and those sites have their own privacy practices.
App stores
Apple and Google provide the app through their stores and may collect information under their own policies, such as crash reports you choose to share with developers. Anything they pass on to us is used only to fix problems in the app.
Children
Wanted Level is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information from anyone.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date. A change that affects what the app does with your information will also be noted in the app's release notes.
Contact
Questions about privacy: support@wantedlevel.bike.