Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Effective September 20, 2026
ChiTransit shows live Chicago Transit Authority train positions, arrival times, service alerts, and journey plans. This policy explains what the app does with information. It is short because the app does very little.
Privacy Policy · Terms of Service
ChiTransit has no accounts and collects no personal information. There is nothing to sign in to, nothing to sign up for, and no profile. Your location is used on your device and is never sent to us. Saved stations stay on your phone.
ChiTransit asks for approximate and precise location while you are using the app. It never asks for background location and cannot access your location when the app is closed.
Location is used for two things, and both are computed entirely on your device:
Your location is never transmitted to our servers and is never stored. Station ranking runs against transit data the app already carries. Declining the permission is fine — the map, arrivals, alerts, and journey planning all keep working; only the two conveniences above stop.
Saved stations and preferences such as light or dark mode are written to the app’s private storage on your phone. This never leaves your device and is deleted when you uninstall the app.
To show live transit information, the app asks our service at chitransit.onrender.com for the
station, route, or journey you are currently looking at, together with a key that identifies
the app — not you. As with any internet service, our host processes the network information
inherent in delivering a response, including your IP address, and uses it to serve the request
and to limit abuse. We do not use it to build a profile of you.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We have never done so.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Render (United States) | Requests to the ChiTransit service, with IP address at the network level | Runs our backend |
| Neon (United States) | CTA station and timetable reference data only — nothing about you | Stores transit data |
| MapTiler | Requests for map tiles covering the area you are viewing, with IP address | Draws the base map |
| Chicago Transit Authority | Nothing about you — our servers ask, your device never does | Source of live transit data |
Your device contacts MapTiler directly for map imagery. Their policy is at https://www.maptiler.com/privacy-policy/.
ChiTransit is a general-audience transit app, not directed at children, and collects no personal information from anyone — children included.
Because we hold no personal information about you, there is nothing for us to look up, export, correct, or delete on request — everything ChiTransit keeps about you is already on your own phone and under your control.
If this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it, and the new version is published here before the change ships in a release.
Using ChiTransit is also covered by the Terms of Service, which explains what the app promises about transit information — in short, that arrival times are predictions rather than guarantees — and states that ChiTransit is not affiliated with the Chicago Transit Authority.
ChiTransit is operated from Chicago, Illinois, United States, and all data described above is processed in the United States.
Questions about this policy can be sent to the developer email address shown on the app’s Google Play listing, under “App support”.