Years ago, I pulled up in front of a hard-to-understand two-lane road that looks like a dirt road while hunting turkeys in Wyoming’s Black Hills. A tangled barbed rope fence stretched along the road with a sign that read “POSTED. “No trespassing. “
There deserved to have been a public terrain that I could simply walk on, attached to a giant audience, but my paper map was characteristically vague. I fired up a handheld GPS with a chip made through a new company called onX, and it showed what I thought I knew: that the barbed wire fence and sign were closer to the road than they were. I deserve not to have been. Someone would seize additional small assets and thereby cut off access to a giant chunk of public land.
Most hunters and fishermen have similar stories related to virtual maps that reveal access. Few technologies have revolutionized access to hunting, fishing, and recreation as much as the ability to see exactly where we are in relation to landownership barriers in real time. Now, virtual maps also allow us to identify burned spaces or habitat treatments, visualize probabilities of extraction, and even connect to mobile surveillance cameras.
But the GPS revolution has faced increasing difficulties. Some onX users wonder where all this knowledge is stored, if we’re being tracked in the most remote spaces in the country, and if our benchmarks could one day be sold. Biologists worry that greater access will force more people to go to the last spaces where they seek shelter, while hunters and fishermen complain that novices can now locate the same secret spots they’ve worked for years to uncover.
“With change, there are other people who win and others who lose,” says Randy Newberg, a Montana hunting advocate and sponsored TV personality through onX and GoHunt. “They can say, ‘Some other people know, now they know my location. ‘Well, the bottom line of all of this is that we, as a community, are winners based on the principle of having those maps on our phones. “
As mapping companies become more sophisticated, hunters, hikers, biologists, and nonprofits are looking for the pros, cons, and future of the onX effect.
Like most innovators, Eric Siegfried founded onX because he needed something. He had moved to Missoula, Montana, in 2007, only months after Apple released its first smartphone.
At the time, I was standing in line outside the offices of the U. S. Forest Service. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Land Management have been working to collect giant paper maps. Then I would go out to compare what I saw on the maps with what I discovered in the woods. .
“You had GPS information from Garmin, but no owner information,” he says. “I looked it up on my GPS. “
So in 2009, he used his computer software skills to build a chip that would fit into a user’s handheld GPS device that not only showed where the person was, but who owned the land in and around that spot.
Eventually, onX evolved from a chip to an app and it’s now a multi-million-dollar operation with about 400 employees, three separate programs (onX Hunt, onX Offroad, and onX Backcountry), and millions of users (the private company won’t disclose exact user numbers).
In October, the company announced $87. 4 million in a Series B investment, an unstable term for a current round of investments. The investment comes from Summit Partners, a company that has invested in a wide range of generation companies around the world. This is the same investment organization that provided the first onX investment circular in 2018.
While onX remains the biggest player in the GPS game, it’s far from the only one. Companies like GoHunt, HuntWise, BaseMap, HuntStand, GAIA GPS, and Spartan Forge support users plan hunts (as well as hikes, fishing trips, hiking trips, and whatever else they need to do, depending on the app), searching distinguish yourself from onX and everyone else.
Like smartphones themselves, those apps are so integral to our lives that even users who have strong doubts about the security of apps and the effects of using them are reluctant to abandon them.
Here’s what onX needs to explain now: The company doesn’t monitor your location in real-time. However, when tracking is enabled, your GPS coordinates are stored on onX’s servers.
The company gets asked about this a lot.
Land Tawney understands why. The Montana hunter and former executive director of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers uses onX as much as any hunter. He stays home for new places, downloads maps so he can use them when he’s in the woods and off duty, and starts the app every time. and every time he is in a new country.
Then last fall, he found a piece of tribal land newly opened to the public near an area he’d been hunting for 20 years. He went to mark it in onX so he’d remember where it was for next time, but then… he didn’t.
“On some level, I just didn’t want other people to know about it, and maybe that’s even someone grabbing my phone while we’re looking at onX,” he says. “I found it because of the app, and anyone else could find it. But still.”
In some ways, those privacy considerations are unwarranted: after all, what’s the price of a single user’s knowledge when all onX users can see the same maps in the first place?However, in other respects, privacy considerations related to the use of Virtual Applications are fully justified. This is because knowledge points, just like content on Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, are absolutely private.
Companies are legally required through the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution to keep secret the data they share with them, says Ryan Semerad, an attorney at the Fuller law firm.
One of the consequences here is that those questions of knowledge (or questions of form) can be passed on to the authorities and then, if they are part of a trial, made public.
Four Missouri hunters represented through Semerad were able to learn how this procedure works. They rose to prominence in 2021 after onX located the precise spot where two corners of public land touched a sagebrush-covered hillside in southeastern Wyoming. He used a ladder to get from one public square to another, killed elk and deer, and used the same ladder to pack meat.
Three years, a trespassing trial (in which the hunters were found not guilty), a civil lawsuit against the hunters (which a judgment dismissed), and even more subsequent appeals, the case has become the typical example of what GPS mapping means. can achieve. But after the courts forced onX to produce evidence of where the men had walked, lawyers spent weeks arguing over an argument made through a hunter about their onX, which was later dubbed the “Waypoint 6” Array.
The landowner’s attorney said Waypoint 6, a marked location on personal land, showed hunters had entered without permission. The hunters’ lawyer said the point only proved that the hunter had tapped a spot on a map, evidence of how we all touch our phones and evidence of criminality.
The hunter himself, Zach Smith, recently told Outdoor Life that he had no idea how his onX was stitched, only that he would have possibly created it using the phone with gloves on, or in the snow or rain, and hit it by mistake. a place, not because he was in that place.
Regardless, the incident has brought to light the fact that the information we buy on onX is rarely very private.
While onX officials acknowledge they will have to comply with court-ordered subpoenas, they say the only other way to provide data to anyone other than the individual user is through missing persons cases. In those situations, location knowledge can simply help with a rescue or recovery, says Zach Sandau, head of hunting marketing at onX.
Semerad, the attorney, doesn’t use onX because he doesn’t hunt or fish. But he considers onX and its feared risks to be similar to the rest of the technology we carry around.
“This is a trendy cost-benefit analysis. It’s very useful. Are we going to give up the usefulness of worry?”Semerad said. ” I think it’s been proven time and time again: no matter how many times lawyers, executives, and politicians communicate about the lack of security on Facebook, Instagram, and onX, other people don’t care. We know that they are collecting our data and we do not prevent its use.
But can all the knowledge we buy at onX be aggregated and sold?Suppose, for example, an aggregation of all the landmarks of turkey “perch trees” on public lands. Could OnX compile this knowledge, demonstrate it as a turkey heat map, and then sell it to users willing to pay a much higher price?
onX says no.
“We use tags (as benchmarks) as non-public content and therefore assets of each customer,” Molly Stoecklein, the company’s senior communications manager, wrote in an email after consulting with onX’s legal team. “Our license to use this non-public content is limited to “Service-related” activities (e. g. , analyzing how consumers use our app to improve it with a more intuitive experience).
But could they batch that information and sell it anonymously to advertisers, by considering advertisers “in connection with the Service?” Again, onX says no.
All of the company’s responses are based on their user agreements, which we all provide for creating an account. Could those agreements change? Sure, Semerad says, but not without asking us to point out some other legal agreement, which most of us probably wouldn’t read anyway.
He also notes that he is less invested in a company like onX promoting knowledge and operating outside of privacy because, unlike a flexible site like Facebook, Gmail or TikTok, onX is beholden to its followers.
“OnX wants to make its subscribers happy,” says Semerad. Facebook wants to make advertisers happy. In the world of flexible social media, we’re grain to the mill.
For most of the last century, mainstream public opinion claimed that more people meant more awareness of issues, which meant more advocates.
The idea is not unfounded, and leading environmental and conservation organizations are fighting to get other people out and enjoy nature. Not only is it smart, even imperative, for our own health and well-being, but, as Tawney says, “The only way other people will care a hundred years from now is because they came out, touched it, and felt it. “
However, a developing framework of studies shows that our presence in the field, where it is limited to even smaller spaces, has negative consequences. Skiers push a herd of bighorn sheep across Wyoming’s Tetons to the edge; joggers, hikers, and bikers likely caused a decline in moose numbers near Vail, Colorado; Peepers in Montana and Wyoming are driving grizzly bears out of moth sites.
And virtual maps make it easier for other people to reach farther and deeper than ever before.
“I think there would be even more people in the woods, but they wouldn’t have known where to go,” says Bill Andree, a retired biologist who studied the Vail elk herd during his time at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 2% or 20%? I don’t have any data.
Add to this social media, and the challenge gets worse. Now, a little-used trail, easy to visualize on a virtual map, leading to a less-than-busy spot in the woods can be shared anywhere on the Internet, says Aly Courtemanch, a hunting and fishing biologist from Wyoming. in the Jackson area.
“It allows other people to realize the new places they need to go,” he says, “but also those spaces that had virtually no human presence [now] will be popular. “
Is that an inherently bad thing? No, she says, but we do need to be more aware of our impact on wildlife.
For Siegfried, founder of onX, the challenge doesn’t come from virtual cards, it’s a matter of management. If they realize that too many people in one place are harming wildlife, then they should create restrictions to ease the pressure.
And corporations can spread those rules, Stoecklein adds. For example, onX now includes capes of bighorn sheep in the Tetons so skiers know precisely which spaces are off-limits.
He spends some time browsing online forums and thinks that map apps are ruining national hunting by breeding lazy hunters who don’t want to do the same task as their parents or grandparents.
Instead of calling fish and wildlife agencies in each and every region of each and every state, talking to rangers, tracking wildfires, and keeping in touch with county clerks, all of this data is up-to-date in an app on your phone. Even many state agencies periodically send land ownership adjustments and other critical hunting data to corporations like onX.
But portable GPS mapping hasn’t made hunters lazy, Newberg says. He simply flattened the curve.
“I know all the BLM scammers and the Forest Service foresters and built relationships with them before the virtual card. Was it fair? The ones who say it’s not fair are the ones who knew it before,” he says.
Both Newberg and Tawney see mapping apps as equalizers, as tactics to get more people out hunting. GoHunt’s tag data especially irritates other people who knew that, for example, a certain mule deer hunting domain in Nevada had never had many applicants, and as a result, they may simply fire off a tag more often.
But even before the apps, companies were compiling that information for a fee. The apps just make it easier to find and available to those with smaller bank accounts.
Newberg says the real explanation for the apps’ declining luck is that there are fewer animals in the landscape.
“When I did this, Wyoming had about 650,000 pronghorn, now it’s close to 300,000. I’m a certified public accountant and I’m pretty smart with numbers, and I know that when you have 650,000 animals, the number of stickers is going to go up. “It will be much higher than when you have 300,000,” he says. It’s hard to get back on your feet. It’s conservation and habitat. We want to build a bigger pie. “
Have the half-dozen or so GPS mapping companies cut down the chance for someone to have a public-land secret spot? Maybe, Newberg says, but public-land secret spots are an oxymoron to begin with. They come and go over the years. And if nothing else, he figures mapping apps have opened even more possible honey holes by revealing with pinpoint precision those places we can shimmy through and around.
Read next: 7 Sneaky Ways Landowners Block Access to Public Land
“People will say that I see [mapping apps] as positive because they sponsor me through them,” he says, referring to his current partnership with GoHunt. “But when I’m too old and too grumpy to be patronized like I am, I’ll use virtual cards. “
onX says it plans to continue partnering with nonprofits like Pheasants Forever and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to open up landlocked public lands to the hunt in the West, where about 16. 43 million acres of public lands in 22 states remain inaccessible. In December, the company announced that it had awarded grants to “improve access” to more than 150,000 acres and built or restored 255 miles of trails.
There’s one thing we know for sure: virtual mapping apps are going away. More corporations means more competition, leading to even faster evolution. And each and every app strives to stand out with more complete and detailed data.
OnX will almost certainly use its recent investment to continue to grow beyond the hunting world. The company’s current CEO, Laura Orvidas, didn’t need to go into detail about onX’s long-term life, however, she wrote in an email to Outdoor Life that: “We’re going to motivate new types of recreation with a new product later this year. “
Despite concerns about knowledge privacy, users will continue to subscribe just because we are forced to do so. After onX, there’s no turning back. As an example, even after all the court fees and judgments, those 4 Missouri hunters who crossed paths in Wyoming still use onX and still love it.
“Gen X is one of the most productive teams for the outdoor community. We probably wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without him,” Missouri hunter Brad Cape wrote in an email to Outdoor Life. “I don’t care what data they store. Almost every single retail organization has non-public data.
Christine Peterson is a freelance writer based in southeast Wyoming covering hunting, fishing, outdoor recreation, wildlife and the environment for Outdoor Life, High Country News, National Geographic and others.
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