We Respect Your Privacy: What You Need to Know About BusyBusy and Your Location

We’ve all wondered if our mobile devices are letting someone, somewhere, know too much about us! Location tracking is being used more and more in our daily lives. Apps like Uber, DoorDash, and Target Curbside use your phone's location to make everyday experiences better. While some apps track your location constantly, recording hundreds of pins a minute, BusyBusy isn’t one of them.

Starting in iOS 13 and Android 10, mobile operating systems strive to make sure you know what is impacting your privacy. Because of these changes, you may see notifications pop up saying something like, “BusyBusy has used your location X times in the last three days. Do you want to continue to allow background location use?”

We are totally transparent here at BusyBusy, so let’s talk about those notifications and answer the most common questions we hear from employees about how location services work.

A: No! BusyBusy only records your location information when you are clocked in. Due to this, your boss or company has no way of viewing your location data when you are not on the clock. Even while clocked in, we only update your location pin at key moments: when you clock in or out, change projects or cost codes, or have a significant location change. We are NOT constantly recording your location like a GPS mapping app that grabs coordinates multiple times per second.

A: Absolutely! There are not any pins hidden from you. You can always see every single location pin that was recorded on your time card.

A: Those pins you see on the 3-day location notifications are just times when your device checked in with BusyBusy. If you're clocked in, the location can be recorded. If you're clocked out, that check is only used to do helpful things like remind you to clock in when you get close to the job site. To send that reminder, the app has to be aware at a very low level of where you are, but those location checks are never recorded or saved anywhere in BusyBusy’s system while you are off the clock.

A: We aren’t. That map that pops up with a warning about location services is generated directly by the background operating system of your phone, not us. That map simply shows where your mobile device has shared location points recently. We do not have those locations recorded in our system if you are not clocked in.

A: Apple and Android changed their technology, requiring apps to have location access set to “Always” in order to update your location while you are clocked in with the app running in the background. We can reassure you 100% that our app records your location only while you are clocked in.

A: The easiest way to stop those disclosures from appearing is by setting the location settings on your device for BusyBusy to “Always”. This tells your phone that you are aware of BusyBusy's use of your location and stops it from repeatedly prompting you.

A: No. We respect your privacy! BusyBusy does not sell your clocked-in location data, and we do not record your location while you are clocked out.

A: That is a question for your employer. BusyBusy does not determine whether or not you are required to turn on location services. Keep in mind, certain functionalities of the app will be limited if location services are disabled.

A: If you, your spouse, or your boss calls us to help track down your phone because you left it somewhere (or even buried it in a ditch... lol!), we cannot track your phone if you are not clocked in. We can tell you where the phone was at the exact moment you clocked out, but that’s the best we can do!