The tradeoff nobody mentions
Every major hunting app is a cloud service. Your pins sync to their servers because that's how they justify the subscription — cross-device sync, backup, sharing. But the price is that your scouting data becomes their asset. There is no technical reason a map needs your waypoint locations on its servers to show you public land boundaries. The sync is a feature; the data collection is the business model.
How to scout privately
Use a map that stores waypoints locally on your device. Keep location services set to 'while using' rather than 'always' so no background tracking runs when the app is closed. If you share a spot with a buddy, send a GPX file directly instead of sharing through an app's social features — that keeps the location between the two of you instead of adding it to a shared database. And periodically audit what's stored: if an app lets you download your data, look at what it actually kept.
What HuntTrack does differently
No account is required to use the map or drop waypoints — they save to your device's local storage immediately. Nothing is transmitted anywhere. If you create an account to sync across devices, your pins are backed up so a lost phone doesn't lose your season, but the design starts from 'your spots stay yours' rather than 'your spots feed our dataset.' There are no ads, no analytics SDKs profiling your behavior, and no data brokers in the loop because there's nothing to sell.