Profile, followers, and trips
Who can see my trips, photos, locations and bio on Polarsteps?
Trips, photos, locations
You choose who sees your trips.
There are two settings that determine who can see this information: your account type and your trip privacy level. By default, both settings prevent public sharing. Please be careful when choosing to override these privacy settings and making trips public. Once a trip is public, anyone can see it.
For everyone who creates a new Polarsteps account, the account type (”Who can follow me?”) is set to “Only people I accept”. When another user wants to follow you, you will receive a notification and you can choose to accept or decline their follow request. Only after accepting a follow request can this person see the trips you’ve made available to followers.
Don’t want to make all your trips accessible to your followers? You can use the privacy settings for each individual trip to determine who can view each trip and the photos, text, locations, and statistics in it.
By default, the ”Who can see this trip?” setting for every new trip you add to Polarsteps is set to “Followers”. You can change this privacy level to “Only me” or “Everyone” when creating a new trip or at any point.
When you have added Travel Buddies to a trip, the “Only me” privacy level will mean only you and Travel Buddies.
If you change a trip’s privacy level to “Everyone”, this means that your trip with all published Steps and their content, your route, and trip statistics are visible publicly by anyone visiting your profile. If you wish to keep full control over your trip visibility, we don’t recommend selecting “Everyone”.
Account privacy setting: Only followers I accept
Trip privacy: ‘Only me’ (or ‘Travel Buddies’): No trip access for others besides the owner of the trip (and any Travel Buddies, if applicable).
Trip privacy: ‘Followers’: Trip access for followers and those of Travel Buddies, if applicable, as well as anyone with the secret link.
Trip privacy: ‘Everyone’: Public trip access.
Account privacy setting: Anyone (follower requests automatically accepted)
Trip privacy: ‘Only me’ (or ‘Travel Buddies’): No trip access for others besides the owner of the trip (and any Travel Buddies, if applicable).
Trip privacy: ‘Followers’: Trip access for anyone who follows you or a Travel Buddy, if applicable, as well as anyone with the secret link.
Trip privacy: ‘Everyone’: Public trip access.
Bio
Anyone can see the following basic profile information: your profile picture, name, number of followers, mutual followers, home city, and home country.
It is not possible to hide this account information from the search results, as this is how people find and follow people, but you may choose to use a pseudonym and you are not required to upload a profile picture.
Who can see my “Followers only” trips on Polarsteps?
Trips set to “Followers only” are visible to the people who follow you on Polarsteps, plus anyone you've shared a secret link with (or anyone who has received that secret link from someone or somewhere else) for that trip.
Your account privacy settings for “Who can follow me” are by default set to “Only people I accept”, which means you have to manually approve follow requests. You can choose to set these settings to “Anyone”, which means people can follow you automatically without your approval. You'll still get a notification every time someone new follows you, so you can check who they are, but we recommend being cautious with choosing to set this to “Anyone”.
If you’re at all worried about who can view your “Followers only” trips, we recommend going through your followers and removing anyone you don't recognize or trust: See how to remove followers. At any time, you can also change your trips privacy settings to “Only me”, so trips are kept fully private, visible to no one but you.
Who can follow me on Polarsteps?
By default, your account privacy settings will be set to “Only people I accept”. This means that you will receive a notification for every follow request, which you can accept or decline. Only after accepting a follow request will the person see trips you’ve chosen to share with followers.
If you wish, you can change your account settings to automatically accept everyone that wants to follow you. You can do this by changing “Who can follow me” to “Anyone”. If you choose “Anyone”, anybody in the world could follow you, and if you don’t notice the new follower notification, you may not notice they’ve started to follow you. Please be careful when choosing to set it to “Anyone”, as it means all future follow requests will be automatically accepted and this will give anyone access to any trips that aren’t set to “Only me”.
How do secret links work?
A secret link allows you to share your trip with those who don’t follow you; with anyone who has that link, regardless of whether they have a Polarsteps account (and therefore use the app) or not. This means it’s really important to be careful about sharing this link, as someone might then share it with someone else (who shares it with someone else, etc.). If you want to limit your trip to followers only and want to be in full control who sees your trip and whereabouts, best not to share the secret link with anyone and ask your friends and family to follow you in the app instead.
In the app, you can share a trip link in two ways:
Share a “Followers only” link to your trip to share it with anyone who follows you
Share an “Anyone with the secret link” link to share your trip with anyone, including people without an account. If you share this link, anyone on the internet with that link will be able to see your trip.
Is it still safe to use Polarsteps? How do I check or change my privacy settings?
Yes, it’s still safe to use Polarsteps. You can easily check your privacy settings. These two are most important:
Polarsteps app > Settings > Who can follow me (we recommend setting this to “Only people I accept”).
Polarsteps app > Me tab. On every trip in your profile, you see an icon in the bottom right corner which indicates the privacy level for that trip. Here’s what the icons mean:
🌍 Globe = Everyone can view this trip
👥 People = Followers can view this trip (and people who have your secret trip link if you’ve chosen to share this). This is the default.
🔒 Lock = Only you can view this trip. If you have added Travel Buddies to your trip, they can see it too. Trip links you may have shared previously do not give access.To change the privacy level for a trip: Open the trip > Open the trip menu in the top right corner > Tap “Trip settings” > Tap “Who can see this trip?” > Select your preferred option > Tap “Change privacy level” > Save your trip settings.
Here’s a short instruction video on how to adjust the privacy setting of a trip
Access and security
I’m worried about my trips, photos, and locations. Have they been accessed or downloaded?
If your trip has always been set to “Only me” or “Followers only” and you have never shared a secret link, no one except you and your followers can see or has ever been able to see that trip.
If you have a current or past trip that you’ve set to “Everyone”, this does mean anyone can see the trip, including people without a Polarsteps account that are simply browsing on the internet. You can always and instantly change this trip to “Only me” to make this private, or to “Followers only” in your trip privacy settings. If you need help, reach out to our support team here.
If you’ve got a public trip right now or you’ve had a public trip in the past and you’re worried about its privacy, please contact our team here.
Is there any way someone has my secret link even if I’ve never shared it?
If your trip has always been set to “Only me” or “Followers only”, and you have never shared a secret link, no one else (outside of your followers) can see your trip or any of its private data.
For public trips:
We recently discovered a vulnerability that could, hypothetically and in a very rare set of circumstances (which to our knowledge have not actually occurred), allow a user’s previously-public trip link to be discovered even if it’s been set to “Followers only’ later.
If your trip was set to “Everyone” in the past, and you’ve then set it to “Followers only”, a technical expert may have for a brief period been able to reverse-engineer the secret link from your trip while it was public and later use it to view the trip (but never if it was only ever set to “Only me” or “Followers only”). To our knowledge, this has not happened to any user.
If your trip has never been a public trip, this does not apply to you. The vast majority of our trips are never public.
Nevertheless, to be safe, on August 20, 2026 we expired all secret links as a precaution, and created a new way of generating secret links that is secure. So: right now, no one has the secret link to your trip, unless you have sent it to them since August 20. All new secret links generated from August 20 on have fixed the vulnerability and are secure.
You can read more about this here.
⇒ important note: this only affects secret links, normal link sharing hasn't been touched (i.e. if you share a link to your trip that is set to “Followers only”, only your followers will be able to see your trip).
Does someone have my home address, or my photos?
Home address
If you have all your trips set to “Only me” and you’ve been at any location (like home) while tracking your trip you’d like to keep private, no one except you can see that location. If that trip is set to “Followers only”, only your followers can see that location. If you’ve set it to “Everyone”, anyone can see that location.
If you decide to share your trip with others but want to hide your home location, you can choose to hide the start location of your trip. Here’s how.
Here is how to remove a location from a current or past trip
Here’s a short instruction video on how to adjust the privacy setting of a trip
Photos
If your trip privacy is set to "Only me", only you can see your trip photos. If it’s set to "Followers only", your photos are not accessible to anyone outside that circle. If you've set a trip to "Everyone," anyone can view that trip (also people without a Polarsteps account), including its photos; that's what "public" means.
It's worth knowing that making a trip public doesn't mean you give up ownership of your photos. You still own the content you upload, and just because a photo is publicly viewable on Polarsteps doesn't mean someone else has the right to legally copy, reuse, or republish it elsewhere without your permission.
Privacy settings and safety
Is it still safe to use Polarsteps? How do I check or change my privacy settings?
Yes, it’s still safe to use Polarsteps. You can easily check your privacy settings. These two are most important:
Polarsteps app > Settings > Who can follow me (we recommend setting this to “Only people I accept”).
Polarsteps app > Me tab. On every trip in your profile, you see an icon in the bottom right corner which indicates the privacy level for that trip. Here’s what the icons mean:
🌍 Globe = Everyone can view this trip
👥 People = Followers can view this trip (and people who have your secret trip link if you’ve chosen to share this). This is the default.
🔒 Lock = Only you can view this trip. If you have added Travel Buddies to your trip, they can see it too. Trip links you may have shared previously do not give access.To change the privacy level for a trip: Open the trip > Open the trip menu in the top right corner > Tap “Trip settings” > Tap “Who can see this trip?” > Select your preferred option > Tap “Change privacy level” > Save your trip settings.
Here’s a short instruction video on how to adjust the privacy setting of a trip
Reach out to Polarsteps
I have more questions. How do I contact you?
Polarsteps user?
You can reach us via support.polarsteps.com/contact
Journalist?
Please reach out to press@polarsteps.com
You can also read more here about some changes we’ve made and why, to improve our cybersecurity and address some issues (around public profile data, and around secret links) that we were recently alerted to.