ShiftTally US Privacy Policy
Last updated September 7, 2026. ShiftTally US is a mileage and tax logbook for gig drivers in the United States. This policy describes exactly what the app records, where it is kept and what you can remove.
The short version
ShiftTally US exists to keep a defensible record of your own driving. Your records live on your phone first, and are copied to your private cloud account so they survive a lost device.
- No coordinate ever leaves your phone. There is no reverse geocoding step at all, so nothing is sent to Apple, Google or anyone else to work out where you were.
- Nothing is sold, rented or shared with advertisers, data brokers, gig platforms or anyone else.
- There are no advertising SDKs, no third-party analytics SDKs and no cross-context behavioral advertising.
- No Social Security number, taxpayer identification number, bank account or home address is ever asked for or stored — the app only stores the tax rates you type and the date you typed them, never where you live.
- You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app, at any time.
Location data
Mileage tracking is manual: it runs only between you tapping Start and tapping Stop. There is no automatic drive detection, and no location reading is taken when no trip is running.
Each reading is a latitude, a longitude, a timestamp and an accuracy figure; readings less accurate than 60 meters (about 200 feet) are discarded. The app does not record your speed. Readings are taken roughly every 5 seconds or every 20 meters (about 65 feet).
If you grant "Allow all the time", measuring continues while the screen is locked or you switch to a platform app, and iOS shows its own location indicator while that happens.
Only the most recent position is held on your phone, alongside a running distance total — each new reading replaces the last. Ending a trip keeps the distance and drops the position. No route is ever stored, on the phone or anywhere else.
There is no reverse geocoding: no coordinate is ever sent to Apple, Google or anyone else to become a street name, and a trip carries no address.
What reaches your cloud account is the trip itself: date, times, distance in miles, odometer readings you type, the category, the platform, the vehicle, the purpose and any note you add — never a coordinate.
Records you enter
The rest of the app is what you type, and all of it is copied to your cloud account so it is not lost with the phone:
- Trips: dates, times, distance in miles, odometer readings, category, platform, vehicle, purpose and any note.
- Expenses: category, amount, date, vendor, vehicle, any note and the receipt image.
- Earnings: gross amount, tips, platform fees, trip count, hours online, platform and notes — including rows created when you paste in a platform statement to import.
- Tax settings: the tax year, your own federal marginal income tax rate, your state income tax rate and your local or city income tax rate — each stored as a number with the date you entered it — your filing status, the share of income you want to set aside, and which vehicle is the default. The IRS standard mileage rate is built into the app from published IRS notices; you never type it, and no state, county or city name is ever stored.
- Tax year figures, used by the quarterly payment planner: your prior-year total tax and adjusted gross income, W-2 wages and withholding, other taxable income, and the four Form 1040-ES payments you record as made. These are plain numbers you type; they are used to work out a safe-harbor estimate and nothing else.
- Vehicles: name, make, model and model year — one under the Solo plan, any number under Fleet — whether the car is retired, per-year odometer readings, and the Schedule C Part IV answers about it: the date it was placed in service, whether it is available for personal use, whether another vehicle is available for personal use, whether you keep written evidence, the first year you used it for business and whether you used the standard mileage rate that year.
- Set-aside entries: date, amount, whether it is a deposit or a withdrawal, and a note.
No Social Security number, no taxpayer identification number, no bank account and no address is asked for or stored anywhere in the app.
Kept on your device only
How the app looks — light or dark appearance, or following your phone's own setting, and which accent color you choose — is saved on your device and nowhere else. It is never uploaded, never attached to your account, and does not follow you to a second device.
Receipt photographs
When you attach a receipt, camera or photo library access is requested at the moment you tap to attach one, and the image is uploaded to private storage in your cloud account, filed under your user ID. Only your signed-in account can read it. Deleting the expense deletes the image.
The image is re-encoded before storage, which discards the metadata a camera embeds in a photo — the GPS position where it was taken, the time, and the camera or phone model. Only the picture is kept, resized so the receipt stays legible. If a photo cannot be re-encoded it is not attached at all, rather than uploaded as it came. The original in your camera roll is untouched.
Your account
Signing up takes an email address and a password. Records are written to your phone first so the app works with no signal, then copied to your private cloud account so a lost phone is not a lost tax year.
Your password is stored in hashed form by our backend provider; ShiftTally US never sees it and never stores it on your device. Email verification and password reset use a six-digit code sent to your email.
Your device keeps a session token and the user ID that ties your records to you. Your email address is used only to sign you in, verify the account and recover it — never for newsletters or promotional email.
Subscription and payment
Subscriptions are sold and billed by Apple through your App Store account. Billing happens inside Apple's system: ShiftTally US never receives your card details, your Apple Account credentials or your billing address.
What the app receives is the answer to one question — whether this account currently has an active subscription, and which plan. That answer comes from Apple's own subscription status on the device; it is not written into your tax records and not stored in your cloud account.
Notifications
There is no push server and no push token, so nothing outside your phone knows what the app showed you.
Analytics
The iPhone app contains no analytics. No usage events are collected or transmitted.
Who else handles your data
Only the services needed to run the app:
- Our cloud backend, which hosts the database that stores your records, the private storage that holds your receipts, and the sign-in system.
- Apple, for subscription billing and for the location readings themselves.
Nothing else. No advertising network, data broker, location marketplace or gig platform receives anything.
How long it is kept
Your records are kept until you delete them. That is deliberate: the IRS general rule is that records can be requested going back three years from when you filed, and longer where income was substantially underreported, so a logbook that quietly expired would be worse than none.
Deleting a trip, receipt or earnings entry removes it from your device and from the cloud on the next sync.
Deleting your account
The Account screen has a Delete Account option. It removes your receipt images, then every row — trips, expenses, earnings, set-asides, vehicles, odometer years, tax settings and tax year figures — then your sign-in itself, then the local copy on your device. If any part of that cannot be completed, the deletion stops and your account is left intact rather than partly erased. It cannot be undone and there is no backup to restore from, so export your report first if you may need it.
Deleting your account does not cancel an App Store subscription. Cancel that in your device's subscription settings.
Security
Everything that leaves your device travels over an encrypted connection. In the database, row-level security ties every record to your user ID, so one account cannot read another's. Receipts are private and reached through short-lived signed links, never a public address.
On your device, records sit in the app's own storage, protected by the operating system and by your passcode. No system is perfect, and we will tell affected users if we ever become aware of a breach that puts their records at risk.
Your privacy rights
Under the CCPA, the CPRA and comparable state laws, you have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to get a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to receive it in a portable format, and to not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.
We never sell your personal information and we do not engage in cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.
Most of this you can do yourself: the app shows every record it holds, lets you edit or delete any of them, exports the lot, and deletes the account outright. For anything else, write to shifttally@mpoweredstudio.com — we answer within 45 days.
You can also withdraw location access at any time in your device settings, without losing anything you have already recorded.
Children
ShiftTally US is a tool for self-employed adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, the updated date at the top will change and the new version will ship with an app update. Continuing to use ShiftTally US after that means accepting the revised policy.
Who holds your records
ShiftTally US is published by MPowered Studio. Questions about this policy, or requests about your information under the CCPA/CPRA, go to shifttally@mpoweredstudio.com.
The Privacy and Terms screens inside the ShiftTally US app carry a shorter summary of this policy.