Raccoon Transit shows live transit arrivals, weather, and air quality as a pixel-art scene. It comes in several forms: this website, browser extensions that put the scene on your new tab page, and apps for phones and tablets. This policy covers all of them, including any future ones.
The extensions and the apps all display this same website, with some screens of their own around it. None of them transmits anything of its own or adds any tracking, apart from the Android map and the place search described below.
Your favorite stops, recently viewed stops, and settings are kept on your own device by whichever version you are using. The phone apps also keep a count there of which features you have used, such as tracking a bus or saving a favorite, along with when you first and last used each one, so that a later version of the app can point out something you have not tried yet. None of this, the count included, is transmitted to us or to anyone else. There is no account and nothing to sign in to.
To show arrivals, weather, and air quality, Raccoon Transit requests data for the chosen stop from our own API (api.raccoontransit.com), which relays it from the transit data sources for that city, Open-Meteo, and EPA AirNow. These requests carry the stop id and the random id described below, and nothing else about you. We run no ads, no analytics, and no trackers of our own. We do not track you across other sites or apps, we give nothing to data brokers, and we sell nothing.
Our server keeps an access log of the requests it receives, which includes the requesting IP address, for 30 days. We use it to understand how many people use Raccoon Transit and which of its forms they use. So that those counts are roughly right, your device makes up a random id for itself and sends it with those requests. It is tied to no account, no profile, and nothing else about you. We build no profiles, and nothing goes to anyone else. The log is deleted after 30 days.
Location is optional. If you grant it, Raccoon Transit uses it to show you transit near where you are, such as the closest stops and the city whose service you are in, and to plan directions from where you are when you ask for them. We ask for precise location, because bus stops sit a couple of hundred meters apart and an approximate position is not accurate enough to tell which one you are standing at. Where the platform offers you the choice, you are free to grant approximate instead, and it still works, just less exactly. Your coordinates are sent to our API for those purposes alone, working out what transit is near you or which buses to take, and are discarded once that answer comes back. They are never stored in any database, never attached to an account, profile, or identifier of any kind, and never sold. Apart from the place search described below, they go to no one else. If you decline the permission, everything else keeps working as usual.
The phone apps also draw maps: of the stops near you, of a region's routes, and of the directions you ask for; this website and the browser extensions have no map. On iPhone and iPad the map is Apple's, built into the operating system, and drawing your position sends nothing anywhere. On Android it is Google Maps: it reads your position on your device, under the permission you already granted us, to show where you are. What Google's map itself collects is governed by the Google Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into this policy by reference.
Directions start with a place you type. On iPhone and iPad that text goes to Apple's place search, built into the operating system, and on Android to Google's, under the Google Privacy Policy above. So that places near you come first, the search is also given an area to look in, centered on your position if you have shared it with the app, otherwise on the city you picked. What you type never reaches our server, which receives only the two points to plan between and keeps neither. Home and Work, if you save them, stay on your device. One you saved from a search is looked up again each time you use it, so using it asks Apple's place search on iPhone and iPad, or Google's on Android, for that place by the name and identifier it was saved with. One you dropped on the map is never looked up, and leaves your device only as one of the two points to plan between.
If you ask either phone app to track a bus, or to remind you before one leaves, it hands our server a push token, which is the address Apple or Google uses to deliver those updates to your device. We store it with the stop and trip you asked about, and with the same random id described above. For a bus you are tracking now, it is deleted when your bus departs, when you stop the tracking, or within a few hours at the latest, whichever comes first. For a trip you save ahead of time, which can be up to two weeks away, it is kept until 45 minutes after that trip's departure, or until you remove the trip, whichever comes first. It is used for nothing but sending you the updates you asked for, and it goes to no one but Apple or Google, who need it to deliver them.
The phone apps offer optional theme packs that dress up the scene, bought through the App Store or Google Play as a one-time purchase. That purchase happens entirely inside the store: the store keeps the purchase record, and no purchase record, receipt, or payment detail ever reaches us. The theme you have chosen to show does travel in the address of the page the app loads, so, like the rest of that request, it appears in the access log described above beside your device's random id, and is deleted with it after 30 days. A theme you buy is yours to keep forever, even after it stops being offered for sale.
Questions: contact hello@raccoontransit.com.
Last updated 11 October 2026.