Terms of use
Scope
These terms of use apply to openXtrail at openxtrail.com and to everything you can do there — for example plan and save routes, bring tours over from Komoot or Garmin or upload them as a GPX file, look at them in your own profile, keep an account, receive the newsletter and write to us through the contact form.
openXtrail is operated by, and your contract is with, Marcel Steinmetz, Lüdemannstr. 66, 24114 Kiel. openXtrail is a private project and is not run commercially; the full details are in the legal notice at /en/legal-notice.
No terms other than these apply. Where we have agreed something with you individually, what we agreed takes precedence.
Formation of contract
You can look around this site and plan routes without an account. For anything that belongs to you — saved routes, imported tours, your own settings — you need one.
An account comes about in two steps. Submitting the registration form is your offer to enter into a contract of use. We then send an email to the address you gave; the address is confirmed, and the contract concluded, only when you open the confirmation link in it.
Once signing in with Google is set up, there will be a second route: the account is then created the first time you sign in through Google, and the address counts as confirmed straight away because Google confirmed it — in that case the contract is concluded when the account is created. Today that button only leads to an error message; the privacy policy at /en/privacy says why.
The contract costs nothing. There is no paid service on this site today; what would apply if that changed is set out below under “Paid services”.
You must be at least 16 to have an account of your own. If you are between 16 and 18, you also need your parents' agreement: the 16 comes from data protection law (Art. 8 DSGVO), but the contract itself comes from §§ 106, 107 BGB, under which a contract with a minor is provisionally ineffective without their legal guardian's agreement. We do not ask for your age when you register, and we could not verify an answer if we did.
Account and credentials
An account belongs to one person, and the same email address belongs to only one account at a time — the application will not create a second one on the same address.
Your credentials are yours to look after: choose a password you use nowhere else, and give it to nobody. We do not know your password — only a hash of it is stored, and this application has no way to set somebody else's password. So we will never ask you for it.
If you suspect that somebody else has got into your account, write to us at kontakt@openxtrail.com — and be careful which way you go about it, because only two of the three really do end every session.
If you change your password in the settings under “Account”, other devices stay signed in — that is the path for an ordinary renewal, and the page says so there too. If instead you go through “Forgot password” and set the new password from the link in the email, that ends every open session of the account. So does “Sign out everywhere” under Settings › Account — immediately, and including the session you are sitting at.
Permitted use
openXtrail is open to you for personal, non-commercial use. That covers everything the site offers — for example planning and saving routes, importing or uploading tours, looking at them and reading their numbers, setting up your profile, subscribing to the newsletter and writing to us.
Sharing and a community are planned but do not exist today: no tour and no route you store here is visible to anybody else, and there is nowhere in the application to change that. Who may read your profile, and whether your name can be found, you set yourself under Settings › Privacy. Once sharing features exist, these terms will cover them too.
“Non-commercial” means: not as a data source for an offering of your own, not for advertising, and not to resell what is on this site. If you would like to use openXtrail for something else, ask us at kontakt@openxtrail.com — that is what the address is for.
Prohibited use
A few things are not allowed, and they belong here rather than in an email after they have happened:
- Unlawful content: nothing that infringes other people's rights, incites a crime, insults anybody or disregards personality rights.
- Other people's data without permission: no tour, image or description that belongs to somebody else and that you are not free to upload.
- Automated retrieval: no scripts, crawlers or bulk requests that systematically harvest this site.
- Load that puts the service at risk: nothing that deliberately overloads or disrupts the servers, the map or the route calculation.
- Circumventing access controls: no attempts to reach other people's accounts, other people's content or non-public interfaces — including by defeating a block, a rate limit or a check.
If any of that happens, we may suspend the account until the matter is settled; for a serious breach we end the contract, see “Termination”. A suspended account continues to exist — it simply cannot sign in, and lifting the suspension gives it back unchanged.
Your content
What you upload or create — imported tours, planned routes, names, descriptions, saved places, your profile picture — stays yours. The copyright in it does not pass to us, and we claim no rights over it.
For openXtrail to be able to store your content and show it back to you at all, we need a licence to it. You therefore grant us a simple, non-exclusive licence, revocable at any time, to store your content, to process it technically — to read a GPX file, to re-encode an image to 256 × 256 pixels, to compute an elevation profile from a line — and to display it to you.
The licence goes no further than that. We use your content to run openXtrail and to show you your own content — not for advertising and not to pass on to third parties. Your tours and routes are private until you make them public yourself. Then the licence also covers showing them to the signed-in people who may read your profile — with a private profile, only those who follow you and whom you accepted — and to nobody else. If you create a link for a ride or route, it also covers showing it to anybody who has that link, until it expires or you revoke it. Comments are covered by the section “Comments, likes and reports”.
The licence ends when you delete the content or close your account. For as long as a backup copy exists from which individual entries cannot be removed, it ends for that copy when the copy is overwritten in the ordinary course. Individual routes have a bin before that: a deleted route sits at /en/routes for 14 days and can be brought back within that time. A deleted trip likewise sits in the bin at /en/trips for 14 days. The account has no bin.
Comments, likes and reports
Under a tour you may read, you can like it and write comments. A comment is your content in the sense of “Your content”; the licence there also covers showing it to everybody who may read the tour. Who liked a tour is visible to the same people.
- You can delete your comment at any time. The tour's owner may delete any comment under it.
- Comments are subject to “Prohibited use”; in addition, no advertising and no spam.
- Reporting: you can report comments, tours and profiles to us, with a reason and, if you like, a note. We look at every report. The reported person is not told who reported; whoever reported is told how we decided.
- Removal: if content breaks these terms or the law, we can remove it. You then get a notification and an email with the reasons. If you disagree, write to us through the contact form and we will look at the decision again.
- For repeated or serious breaches, “Prohibited use” applies: we can suspend the account.
- Blocking: if you block each other, we remove your comments and likes between the two of you.
No warranty for route and elevation data
The most important section in this document, and the only one we genuinely ask you to read.
The paths openXtrail calculates on come from OpenStreetMap — a map kept up by volunteers. The elevations come from computed terrain models. Both are good enough to plan a tour with, and both are a description of the world rather than the world: a path can be drawn in the wrong place, can have been closed since the last data update, can lie under snow in winter, can cross a stream that exists only on the map, or can run over land nobody is allowed to enter.
A calculated route is therefore a suggestion. It is not an assurance that the path exists, that it can be walked or ridden, that it is permitted, or that it is safe. The same goes for every number beside it: distance, ascent, duration and gradient are estimates from the same data.
What follows from that is uncomfortable and cannot be taken off your hands: whether a tour suits you is your judgement. Whether you are fit enough is your judgement. Whether your kit is right, whether the weather holds, whether you turn back — yours. On the ground, what you can see counts and not what is on the screen: signs, closures and rights of way apply even where the map says otherwise.
If you spot an error in the map, the most effective way to fix it is OpenStreetMap itself — corrected there, it reaches us with the next data update.
For damage arising from a route being different on the ground than in the data, we are liable only within the limits of the “Liability” section. That is not a formula: it is the reason this section is as blunt as it is.
Availability
openXtrail runs on a single server and is operated by a single person. We therefore promise no particular level of availability — we would not be credible if we did.
Maintenance, updates, trouble at the data centre and plain mistakes all mean the site is sometimes unreachable or only partly working. We put planned interruptions into quiet hours as far as we can.
We may change, add to or withdraw features, and we may discontinue the service as a whole, where there is a reason for it — a technical one, a legal one, or simply the limits of what one person can run — and so far as the change is reasonable for you. In doing so we weigh your interest in what you use against ours. If something you use goes away, we announce it beforehand: with reasonable notice, and where the whole service is affected at least six weeks in advance, so that you can take your data with you.
Paid services
There are none today. Every feature of this site is free of charge: there is no price list, no payment provider, no order flow and no field for payment details. None of it is built into this application.
The section is here all the same, so that it is clear what would apply if that changed. A paid service would be marked as such, with its price, before you ordered it; prices quoted to consumers include statutory VAT where any is charged.
Such a contract would come about only through an explicit order — a button that says it places an order with an obligation to pay. The payment terms would then be there, in front of that button, rather than here.
What is free today does not quietly become chargeable: without your explicit agreement, a feature you already use will not turn into one you have to pay for.
Right of withdrawal for consumers
First, because it is the more common question: registering free of charge is not a contract for payment. A right of withdrawal presupposes one, so there is nothing here to withdraw from — and nothing to lose either, since you can delete your account yourself at any time, see “Termination”.
Should we ever offer a paid service, we will tell you about your right of withdrawal separately and in full before you buy.
Liability
We are liable without limit for intent and gross negligence, for damage arising from injury to life, body or health, and under the Product Liability Act.
For ordinary negligence we are liable only where we breach an obligation whose fulfilment makes this contract possible in the first place and on whose observance you may rely. In that case liability is limited to the damage typically to be expected under a contract of this kind.
Otherwise we are not liable. That applies in particular to the case the section “No warranty for route and elevation data” describes: a route being different on the ground than in the data.
These limits apply to our legal representatives and to the people we use to perform the contract as well. Mandatory statutory claims are unaffected.
Termination
The contract runs for an indefinite period. You can end it at any time and without notice by deleting your account: at /en/account/delete, in two steps. You request the deletion, you get an email with a link, and only the button on the page behind that link actually deletes. What goes and what stays is set out in the privacy policy at /en/privacy.
If you confirm the deletion of your account while a report against you is being reviewed, your account is deactivated until the review is complete and deleted afterwards.
We may terminate the contract on at least six weeks' notice, in text form to the address held in your account.
For good cause we may terminate without notice, above all for a serious or repeated breach of the section “Prohibited use”. We may suspend the account first; suspended means that signing in no longer works, and lifting the suspension gives the account back unchanged.
Deleting the account ends the contract. The deletion is final: there is no bin for it.
Changes to these terms
These terms can change where there is a reason for it: because features are added or dropped, because the law changes, or because a sentence has turned out to be open to misreading.
We announce a change at least six weeks in advance: by email to the address held in your account, or clearly visible in the application itself. The announcement says what is changing and from when.
If you do not object by then and go on using openXtrail afterwards, that counts as agreement. We point this out expressly in every announcement. You can terminate instead — that is, delete your account — and until the change takes effect you can do so without notice.
That agreement by continued use covers only changes that leave the core of the contract untouched — clarifications, editorial corrections, adjustments to new features or to a change in the law. For anything that shifts the essential rights and obligations under this contract, we ask you expressly; without your agreement, the previous terms go on applying to you.
The version in force is always the one here, with the date of its last change at the top of this page.
Applicable law
German law applies.
If you are a consumer and habitually live in another country, the protection given to you by the mandatory provisions of that country is unaffected. This choice of law takes nothing away from you.