Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 October 2026

1. Who we are

Backd is a product of Surgent Tech Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 15843941), registered office 17 Fleming Court, Shevington, Wigan, WN6 8GG.

For the purposes of UK data protection law, Surgent Tech Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described here. For anything to do with your data, email info@surgenttech.co.uk.

This policy covers the website at surgenttech.co.uk and the Backd app.

2. Backd is pre-release

The Backd app is not generally available. It is being tested by a small group of invited testers. Features may change, be withdrawn, or not yet exist. Test data may be deleted as part of development, so Backd should not be treated as a durable record of your training.

3. The website

This website is hosted on Vercel, which keeps short-lived request logs — including your IP address — to deliver the pages and to defend against abuse. The site itself sets no cookies: there are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies to consent to or withdraw from, which is why you are not asked. We run no advertising pixels, and we do not sell or share your data with advertisers.

4. The app — what we collect

Backd exists to coach you while you run, so most of what it holds is data about your running and your body. This list is meant to be exhaustive rather than generic.

Your account

Email address, a password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see it), your display name, and the date you signed up.

Your event

Race or session name, distance, date, start time, target finish time and pace, bib number and wave, and any personal bests you enter.

What the app records while you run

Recorded roughly once a second for the length of a session:

• Location — latitude, longitude and GPS accuracy
• Speed, pace, average pace and cumulative distance
• Elevation and cadence, where a connected service or device supplies them
• Heart rate and heart-rate zone, if you have paired a chest strap
• Phone battery level, sensor status, audio status
• Every coaching cue the app spoke, what it said and when

Location data is the core of the product. Without it the app cannot calculate your pace and so cannot coach you. It is recorded in the background while a session is running, including when your screen is locked. You control this with your device’s location permission and can revoke it at any time — the app will then be unable to run a session.

Health and fitness information

• Body mass
• Sweat-rate measurements, each stored with the temperature, intensity and activity it was measured in
• Carbohydrate tolerance history — how much you took per hour, over what duration and intensity, which products, whether you had gastrointestinal symptoms, and any note you write about them
• Caffeine habit
• What you ate and drank during a session, and when
• Post-session reviews — your rating, your energy, your gut response and any notes you write, and which products worked

Health screening — special category data

Before the app will build you a fuelling plan it asks a few screening questions and stores the answers: whether you are pregnant, whether any of a short list of clinical flags apply to you (for example diabetes, or medication affecting fuelling), and your age.

This is special category data about your health under Article 9 of the UK GDPR, as are the gut-symptom and heart-rate records above. We process it only with your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)), which you give by completing the screening and can withdraw at any time by emailing us or deleting your account.

We collect it in order to refuse. The engine uses these answers to decide when not to give you nutrition guidance, and to tell you to speak to a clinician instead. It is a safety gate, not a profile.

Backd is for adults. It is not intended for and must not be used by anyone under 18, and the engine refuses to produce guidance for an age under 18. If you believe a child has given us data, email us and we will delete it.

Audio, and messages from other people

Where a feature involves voice — a coach’s voice note, or a message from a friend cheering you on — we store the recording so it can be played to you. If you share a supporter link, the messages people send and the name they give are stored so they can reach you.

Every supporter message is automatically checked for tone before it is delivered, by the AI service named in section 6, so that unkind or patronising messages do not reach you mid-race.

Connected services and devices

• If you connect Strava, we store the tokens Strava issues, your Strava user id, the permissions you granted, and the activities we import on your instruction. Disconnecting revokes our access.
• If you connect Garmin, we store the tokens Garmin issues, your Garmin user id, the permissions you granted, and the completed activities we import on your instruction. We do not request or receive all-day health data, and we do not receive live or real-time data from your device. Disconnecting revokes our access. No artificial-intelligence system processes data that came from Garmin. It is not sent to an AI service, not used to train, test, evaluate or improve a model, and nothing derived from it — a summary, a recommendation or an insight — is used for those purposes either. That exclusion is absolute and is not something you can opt in to: it holds even if you grant the modelling consent described in section 4.10. It is enforced by the database rather than by this policy.
• If you pair a heart-rate strap, we store its name, model, Bluetooth identifier and last known battery level so it can reconnect automatically.

Diagnostics

The app keeps a technical log of its own behaviour — GPS quality, Bluetooth state, whether audio played, whether a save succeeded. Most of this stays on your device and reaches us only if you deliberately export it. A summary of how a finished session went is stored with the session.

Using your sessions to improve Backd

Separately from everything above, we ask whether your recorded sessions may be used to improve when and how firmly Backd speaks — to train statistical models that make the coaching better for everyone, not only for you.

This is a separate, explicit, opt-in choice, and it is off unless you turn it on. You can withdraw it at any time in the app under Profile → Data & modelling, and withdrawing it costs you nothing else. We keep a record of when you gave it and when you withdrew it, so neither of us has to rely on memory.

Three limits apply whatever you choose:

• Safety limits stay outside the model. A model may influence when and how firmly we speak. It will never decide whether a recommendation is safe — every nutrition figure traces to a named practitioner.
• Runs imported from another service are never used for it. A session that came from Strava, Garmin, COROS or Suunto is excluded from model training regardless of your choice, because those services’ terms govern what we may do with data they supply. The database enforces this, not a policy.
• Your coach cannot make this choice for you. If your account is linked to a coach, the app refuses their attempt to give or withdraw it.

It also changes how long we keep that record. The coaching record described above is normally kept for 12 months. If you give this consent, the record for your own Backd-measured sessions is kept for 36 months instead, because a year of sessions spans only two or three training cycles and is not enough to learn anything across a season. Two things follow, and they are part of the period rather than promises about it: sessions that can never be used for training — anything imported from another service — stay at 12 months whatever you choose; and withdrawing consent shortens the period again, that same night, because the period is read from your current choice and not from a snapshot taken when you made it.

How the app is used

We record what happens in the app as behaviour, not measurement: that a session started, that it finished, that a cue was delivered, that a sync failed, which screens were opened. We use it to tell whether the product works — whether people get through setup, whether cues actually arrive, whether anything is broken.

Three things are true of this by design, and they hold because of the shape of the data rather than because we promise it:

• No health value can appear in it. There is no field for a heart rate, a pace, a weight, a carbohydrate figure or a symptom, and no field that can hold free text at all — so none of it can end up there by mistake.
• Durations are recorded as ranges, such as “30 to 60 minutes”, never as an exact number of seconds.
• It is not linked to your name or email. It carries a random identifier that means nothing without our own database.

Our analytics provider, PostHog, receives a copy of these events in the EU. It never receives anything else. The detailed record of your coaching — what the app saw and why it spoke — stays in our own database.

What we do not collect

• We do not ask for or store payment details.
• We do not read your contacts, photos, calendar or messages.
• We do not track you across other apps or websites.
• We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

5. Why we use it, and on what basis

Where we rely on consent you can withdraw it at any time. Where we rely on legitimate interests you can object, and we will stop unless we have a compelling reason not to.

6. Who we share it with

These providers act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes.

Data imported from Garmin is processed only by Supabase and Vercel. It does not reach Anthropic, PostHog, or any other provider in this list, and it is not used to train, test or evaluate any model. If you connect Garmin, the only providers that ever hold that data are the two that store and serve the app itself.

If you have a coach linked to your account, that coach can see your profile, your sessions and your plans. Email us to unlink one.

We will also disclose data where legally required, and to professional advisers or an acquirer in connection with a sale of the business.

International transfers

Our main database is in Ireland, inside the EEA. Some providers above are in the United States. Where data leaves the UK for a country without a UK adequacy decision, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with each provider’s own safeguards.

7. How long we keep it

8. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased;
• restrict how we use it;
• receive a copy in a portable format;
• object to processing based on legitimate interests;
• withdraw consent at any time, including for the health data in section 4; and
• not be subject to a solely automated decision with legal or similarly significant effect.

On that last point, to be clear: Backd’s coaching cues are generated automatically from your live data. They are suggestions about pace and fuelling during a run. They carry no legal consequence, and the engine is built to withhold guidance rather than guess when it is not confident.

To exercise any right, email info@surgenttech.co.uk. We will respond within one month, and may ask you to confirm your identity first.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. We would rather you came to us first.

9. Security

• All traffic between your device and our servers uses TLS.
• Data at rest in our database is encrypted.
• Access to your rows is enforced in the database itself, not only in the app, so one account cannot read another’s data.
• Our audio storage cannot be listed or browsed; files are reachable only by their exact address.
• Only the two people who run Surgent Tech Ltd have administrative access.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your rights we will tell you, and the ICO, as required.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and — if the change is significant — tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

11. Health and medical disclaimer

Backd is a fitness and performance tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and nothing it says is medical advice. Its nutrition guidance is built on a framework provided by a qualified sports nutritionist and is general in nature. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, are taking medication, or have any doubt about whether exercise or a fuelling strategy is safe for you, speak to a doctor or a registered dietitian. If you feel unwell during a session, stop.