Who can see your drives.
Effective: 2026-08-01 · Last updated: 2026-08-01
Automatic mileage tracking is the most sensitive thing Taxottic does. It runs in the background on your phone and it records where you drove. This page describes exactly what is recorded, how long it is kept, and who other than you can see it. It is part of our Privacy Policy.
It is off until you turn it on
Automatic tracking is off by default. It starts only after you open the Mileage screen, read the explanation there, tap Continue, and then grant your phone's location permission. You can turn it off from the same screen at any time, and you can deny or revoke the permission in your phone's settings. If tracking is off, you can still log drives by hand.
While tracking is on, the app records location in the background, so a drive is captured even when the app is closed. On Android a persistent notification is shown for as long as the tracker is running.
What is recorded
- GPS points while you move: latitude, longitude, speed, accuracy, and the time of each fix. A new point is taken roughly every 25 metres of travel (100 metres in battery-saver mode).
- Trips assembled from those points: start and end time, distance, the route line, your business-or-personal classification, the deduction amount, and any note you add.
- Frequent places. The app clusters your recent driving history to infer where you regularly start and stop, and labels them home, work, or stop. This is used to restart tracking reliably and to make trip detection better. These inferred places are visible to you only.
- Device health: your platform, app version, whether tracking is enabled, the location permission you granted, whether precise location is on, whether battery optimisation or low-power mode is active, and how recently the app last uploaded. This carries no coordinates. It exists so we can tell you when tracking has silently stopped, which is the most common way people lose deductions.
We do not record heading, altitude, your battery percentage, your device advertising identifier, or your phone number. We do not use physical-activity recognition.
How long it is kept
These are the actual windows enforced by our nightly retention job, not aspirations:
- Raw GPS fixes are deleted 30 days after they have been built into a trip. A fix that never got built into a trip is closed out after 45 days and deleted 30 days after that, so no raw fix survives past roughly 75 days.
- Device-health history is deleted after 30 days. The single most-recent device-health record per driver is kept while the account exists, because the trip-building job reads it.
- Trips and their route lines are kept until they are deleted. There is no automatic expiry on them. They are removed when you delete the trip, when the company is deleted, or when the account is deleted. We keep them because a mileage deduction has to be substantiated to the IRS years after the drive.
- Inferred frequent places are recomputed from your last 90 days of driving and are removed with the account.
You can delete any trip yourself from the Mileage screen. Deleting a trip deletes its route line with it.
What a manager can see
If you drive for a company on Taxottic, people other than you can see some of your drives. This is the part worth reading carefully.
A manager or owner at your company can see a drive once it is classified as business and confirmed. For those drives they see:
- the route line on a map, drawn from your GPS points,
- the start and end time of the drive,
- the distance and the deduction amount,
- any note you attached,
- your name, and your department if one is set,
- when they open a single driver's view, a street-level label for where the drive started and ended, which can include the name of a business at that address,
- your device-health status, meaning whether tracking is on and when your phone last uploaded. Managers use this to spot a phone that has stopped tracking.
A manager viewing the whole team sees this for every driver on the team by default.
Drives you classified as personal, drives you have not classified yet, and drives still waiting for your confirmation are not shown to your manager. Their route lines are never sent to a manager's screen. The only way a drive becomes visible to your company is if it is marked business and confirmed.
If your company has engaged an outside accounting firm through Taxottic, that firm sees the same category of drives, business and confirmed only, across the clients it is engaged with, together with the company's saved places.
Taxottic staff can technically reach this data to operate and support the service. Any such access is recorded against the named employee and is visible to the account owner in the audit log.
If you are the employer
When your company enables mileage tracking for staff, your company decides who is tracked and why. Employee location monitoring is regulated, and the rules are not the same everywhere. Several US states require specific written notice or consent before an employer tracks an employee, some restrict tracking outside working hours or on an employee's own vehicle, and the UK and EU treat it as high-risk processing that generally requires a documented necessity and proportionality assessment and a lawful basis that is usually not employee consent.
We give you the product controls, this notice, and a Data Processing Agreement. We cannot tell you whether your particular deployment is lawful where your people work. Nothing on this page is legal advice. Take advice from your own counsel before you roll mileage tracking out to employees.
What we can tell you about the design: tracking is opt-in on the driver's own device, the driver classifies each drive, and only drives the driver marks as business become visible to the company.
Where location data goes
Location data is not sold, and it is not used for advertising, profiling, or any purpose other than your mileage deduction and making the tracker work.
It is stored in our database with our hosting providers, and coordinates are sent to Google Maps Platform so that maps, route thumbnails, and place names can be drawn. That means Google receives the coordinates involved in rendering a map or naming a location. The full list of vendors is at /legal/subprocessors.
Your choices
- Turn tracking off from the Mileage screen at any time.
- Revoke the location permission in your phone's settings.
- Delete individual trips, which deletes their routes.
- Export everything we hold on you from /settings/data.
- Ask us to delete your data by writing to privacy@taxottic.com. If your drives were recorded for an employer, that employer may hold its own copy of the business mileage records it needs for tax substantiation, and we will tell you if that is the case.