Your GPX knows where you live
A watch export starts at your front door, timestamps your weekday mornings and names the device that recorded it. GPX Veil cuts the ends off, deletes every point inside the areas you mark, removes the fields you would rather not publish — and rewrites the file here, in your browser.
- Trim the start and finish
- Delete points inside a zone
- Strip times, heart rate, device
Drop a GPX or TCX file here
Watch, Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot exports all work.
You can also paste the contents of a GPX file straight onto this page.
The file is parsed by the browser's own XML parser and rewritten on this page. It is never uploaded — after the page has loaded you can switch the network off and the tool still works. The sample is a synthetic 8 km loop generated here in your browser: timestamps on a weekday morning, heart rate, cadence, power, temperature, a device name and a waypoint called “Home”. It is not a recording of a real person.
What the tool does
Cut, not blur
The first and last metres are deleted outright, and any circle you draw loses every point inside it. The track is split where it crosses the boundary, so nothing survives in the middle of a segment.
Every field, before and after
Timestamps, elevation, heart rate, cadence, power, temperature, waypoints, author, links and the creator attribute are each listed with what they held and what is left once your settings are applied.
The map is drawn offline
The route preview is SVG generated on this page — contour paper, scale bar and all. OpenStreetMap tiles are a checkbox that is off by default, and the only thing here that ever reaches the network.
A file that still uploads
The export is GPX 1.1 with the topografix namespace and the Garmin extension namespaces, written at the coordinate precision you chose. Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot and RideWithGPS read it as an ordinary track.
About GPX Veil
A GPX file is plain XML, and it carries far more than the map picture it produces. Every <trkpt> holds a latitude and longitude written to six or seven decimal places — a metre or better — usually alongside a UTC timestamp, an elevation and whatever your watch measured that second. Export an activity from Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot or a Garmin, Polar or Suunto watch and the file begins exactly where you pressed start: a driveway, a car park, a stairwell. GPX Veil is a GPX editor built for that one problem — trim the start and end of a track, anonymise a GPS track with privacy zones, strip timestamps from a GPX file and take out the sensor data before you hand the file to anyone.
All of it happens inside the page. The file is read with the browser's own DOMParser, transformed in plain JavaScript and written back out as GPX 1.1 — no upload, no account, no queue, no size limit beyond what your device can hold in memory. You can verify that: open the page, switch your network off, then clean a file. The single exception is the optional OpenStreetMap tile layer, a checkbox that stays off until you tick it and that only ever requests map images for the area on screen. What a cleaning tool cannot do is undo a publication or change what a platform has already stored, so clean the file before the first upload rather than after it.
Guides & articles
How a track gives away an address, what the GPX format really stores, and where platform settings stop.
How GPS tracks reveal where you live, work and when you're away
Two points in a track matter more than all the others: the first and the last. Here is how they turn into an address, why radius-based hiding leaves an edge that can be reconstructed, and what actually helps.
The GPX format explained: tracks, waypoints, extensions and what your watch writes
GPX is plain XML you can open in a text editor. Here is what each element holds, what your watch bolts on through extensions, and which fields carry more about you than you would expect.
Sharing routes safely: Strava privacy zones, hidden start/end and what still leaks
Platform privacy settings crop a map for other viewers. They do not change the file you export, the segments you appear on, or what the people you ride with upload.
Frequently asked questions
Is my track uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by your browser's own XML parser, changed in memory and written back out on this page. There is no server component, no account and no analytics. Once the page has loaded you can switch your network connection off and the tool keeps working.
Does the map connect to the internet?
The default preview does not — it is an SVG drawn on this page, contour paper and scale bar included. If you tick “Show map tiles (OpenStreetMap)”, Leaflet asks OpenStreetMap's servers for the tile images covering the area on screen, so those servers see your IP address and roughly which area you looked at. The track itself is never sent; only tile coordinates. Leave the box unticked if that matters to you.
How much should I cut from the start and the finish?
There is no single right number. Two hundred metres hides a specific door on a dense street but not in a cul-de-sac where only one route leads out; 500 to 1000 m is a more honest default in the suburbs. If the shape of what is left still points back at one address — a single lane out of a village, for example — use a privacy zone instead, because it deletes everything inside a circle rather than only shortening the line.
Can it open TCX or FIT files?
TCX yes: it is XML, and GPX Veil reads both activities and courses from it, carrying over the track points, elevation, heart rate, cadence and power, then exports the result as GPX. FIT is a compact binary format and is not supported — export GPX or TCX from Garmin Connect, Strava or your watch app first.
If I remove the timestamps, will Strava still take the file?
It will take it, but not as a training session. Without <time> elements there is no duration and no pace, so Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot treat the file as a route or a course rather than an activity; distance and elevation still come out correctly. If you want the activity to keep its pace, choose “Keep only relative times” — the first point becomes 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z and every interval after it is preserved — or shift the whole track to a date and time you pick.
How accurate is the file after fuzzing the coordinates?
Rounding to four decimal places puts every point on a grid roughly 11 m across at mid-latitudes; three places is about 110 m and the line starts to look like a staircase. The jitter option keeps full precision but moves the whole track by a smooth, seeded offset of up to the distance you set, so the shape survives. Both change the measured distance a little — usually well under one percent for rounding, more for a large jitter.
What happens to waypoints?
They are removed by default, because a waypoint named Home or Office tells a reader more than the coordinates around it do. Untick “Waypoints” under File metadata to keep them. Even then, any waypoint that falls inside a privacy zone is deleted with the track points, and the report shows how many survived.
Is there a file size limit?
The tool refuses files over 80 MB, which is far beyond what a watch produces — a ten-hour ride recorded once per second is around 10 MB of GPX. Larger files are read with a progress bar, and the sliders stay responsive because recalculation runs at a lower priority than your input. The preview draws a reduced set of points so panning stays smooth; the exported file always contains every point that survived your settings.