Profile Grouping and Privacy

Controlling how profiles are grouped and displayed on the app

Privacy and Organizational Sharing

When you create a snow profile, the profile is automatically added to a group with other profiles from the same time and location, and uploaded to the cloud. Who can see the profile is dependent on what the privacy setting is for your group. This can be set as a default, and can be changed on each profile group after collection. This works the same way as for manual observations - learn more here.

Profile Grouping

When a snow profile is collected and transferred to your phone, it may be combined with other profiles into a “profile group”. These groups are intended to hold snow profiles taken at the same time and location. The thought behind this is that it is always recommended to take multiple Snow Scope profiles in a single location to account for any small scale variability in the snowpack.

By default, the Snow Scope App is setup to automatically create these groups based on time and location, but there are some use cases where you may want to manually create groups. For example, if you were doing a transect of a slope and wanted to collect data every 5 meters across the slope, you might want to force all of those profiles to be contained in the same group even though they are not the same location.

In order to manually control profile grouping, go to “Profile Grouping Mode” under the “Snow Scope Probe” dropdown in the app and switch grouping mode to “Manual”. This will create a dialog box at the bottom of your main app screen. If “Same” is selected, any new profiles collected will be added to the previous group, while if “New” is selected, any new profiles will be added to a brand new group.

The app will automatically switch to the “Same” mode after a single profile is added to a “New” group. This is intentional to allow ease of putting subsequent profiles in the same manually created group without having to tap “same” every time. Tapping on “new” will put the next profile into a new group.

If you set grouping settings to “single”, the profiles will still be assigned groups via the “auto” grouping algorithm, but will be displayed in the app as individual profiles. Think of single as more of a “viewing” setting in which profiles that were created with either the auto or manual grouping mode can be viewed as individual profiles, while the “auto” and “manual” settings actually control how grouping gets assigned.