RaftWhat Raft knows about you
Last updated 23 September 2026.
Raft helps families cycle to school together, which means it holds where children live. That is not something to be casual about, so this page is written to be read rather than to be defensible.
The short version
- No accounts and no passwords. You get a private link by email.
- Nothing about you or your children is sold, shared for advertising, or used to train anything.
- There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party analytics.
- You can remove yourself, and everything we hold about you, from a link in any email we send.
What we store
When you join or start a bike bus:
- Your first name and email address.
- Your home location, as map coordinates, plus whatever address text you typed or we looked up.
- How many children would ride, and their first names if you choose to add them. You do not have to.
- Your school, and whether you can take a turn chaperoning.
- Which mornings you are down to ride along.
If you use the find-families page without joining a raft, we store the same things, plus the name of a street near you, which we work out once so that other families can be shown a rough area rather than your pin.
Who can see what
| Who | What they see |
|---|---|
| Families on the same bike bus as you | Your first name, how many children ride, their first names if you added them, and your home pin on the map. Seeing where everyone lives is how a sensible meeting point gets chosen. |
| The organizer of your bike bus | All of the above, plus your email address and your address text, so they can reach you and remove you if you ask. |
| Families at your school who are looking but have not joined | Your first name, how many children would ride, how far away you are rounded to a tenth of a mile, and the name of a nearby street. Never your address, your pin, or your email. |
| Somebody holding a join link | The school, the times, and how many families and children are on the bus. Nothing at all about any individual family until they join. |
| Everyone else, including search engines | Nothing. |
Before anyone is shown anything about the families near them, they have to confirm their email address. Without that, typing a school's name into a form would be enough to survey the families living around it.
How we count usage
We keep daily totals: how many people opened a page, how many confirmed a link, how many emails went out. We also keep, for each family, the date you last opened your link and a record of the last twenty emails we sent you and whether they arrived. That last one exists because a family once went days without a confirmation email and nobody could tell.
We do not keep a trail of which pages any individual looked at, and there is no advertising or analytics code of any kind on this site.
Cookies
One cookie per bike bus, holding your private link so you do not have to dig the email out every time. It does nothing else and is not shared. Nothing on this site is used to follow you anywhere else.
Who else touches your data
- Vercel hosts the site. Upstash stores the data. Both in the United States.
- Resend sends the email.
- OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) turns an address into coordinates, so the address you type is sent there. BRouter and OSRM work out the cycling route, so meeting point and school coordinates are sent to them. None of these is told who you are.
There is no advertising network, no data broker, and no analytics company involved.
Children
Raft is for parents and carers. Children do not create accounts and are not asked for anything. The only information about a child is a first name, which is optional, and a count, both entered by an adult.
Getting your data removed
- Every email we send has a link to turn the emails off or leave the bike bus entirely.
- Leaving deletes your record, your pin and your chaperone slots. The organizer is told the headcount changed, and nothing else.
- If you were only on the find-families list, the link in those emails takes you off it and deletes the record.
- Anything else, write to feedback@raftbikebus.com and I will do it by hand.
Usage counters and the record of emails we sent you are kept for about a year and then expire on their own.
One thing worth understanding
Because there are no passwords, the link in your email is your key. Anyone who has it can see your bike bus and act as you on it. Treat it the way you would a key to your front door: do not forward it. The join link, the one that looks like raftbikebus.com/j/three-words-and-a-number, is the one that is safe to share.
Changes, and who to shout at
If this page changes in a way that matters, everyone on a bike bus gets an email about it rather than a quietly edited date. Raft is a personal project run by one person, Matthew Rascoff, and not by any company or institution. Questions, complaints and requests all go to feedback@raftbikebus.com.