Privacy Policy
There are no accounts, no advertising, no trackers, and no third-party analytics. Nothing here or in the app reports you to Google, Meta, or anyone else. Our servers never record your IP address, and never what part of the map you were looking at. We do keep a small operational log with the identifying parts stripped out before anything is written, described in full below. Almost everything the app remembers stays on your device; the one exception is push notifications, which need a little on our side while they are switched on, and that is spelled out below.
This app is operated by Blake Hughes. This policy explains what happens to information when you use it. It is deliberately short, because there is not much to explain.
What stays on your device
These never leave your phone except in your own iCloud/device backups:
- App settings and display preferences
- Your watchlist of aircraft, unless you turn on notifications, which requires sending it to us; see below
- Your feeder ID, if you have one
- The name and email Apple provides if you use Sign in with Apple
- Your subscription status
We do not operate an accounts server, and there is no sign-up. Unless you turn on notifications, nothing about you is created on our side at all. If you do turn them on, the next section describes exactly what exists and how to remove it.
Push notifications
This is the one feature that stores something about you on our servers, and only while you have it switched on.
When you enable emergency or watchlist alerts, the app sends us:
- a random identifier the app generates for your installation. Not your Apple ID, not your device's serial or advertising identifier, and not derived from anything about you
- the Apple push token for your device, which is what lets Apple deliver a notification and is useless to anyone else
- which alert types you turned on
- the hex codes of the aircraft on your watchlist, so we can tell when one of them takes off
- if you set up proximity alerts: the coordinates and radius of each place you chose, but never its name. The label you give a place ("Home", "Hangar") stays on your phone; our server sees only an unlabelled circle tied to the same random identifier, and the notification we send says an aircraft is near one of your places without naming which. Place coordinates are never written to any log.
That record is not linked to your name, email, Apple ID, location, or anything else. We hold none of those. It is not used for analytics or shared with anyone. Apple necessarily sees the notification in order to deliver it.
Turning notifications off deletes it. The app tells our server to remove the record immediately. Records are also deleted automatically after about 60 days without contact, and a token Apple reports as dead is dropped as soon as we learn of it. Deleting the app has the same effect once that happens.
Location
If you grant location access, it is used on your device only to centre the map on you and to show distance and bearing to aircraft. Your device's location is never transmitted to us.
To be complete about the one related thing that does reach us: when the map loads aircraft, the app asks our server for the geographic area currently on screen. That request necessarily tells our server which area is being viewed. It is held in memory only for as long as it takes to answer, and it is never written to a log. The coordinates are also rounded to a coarse grid before use, so many nearby users produce the same request.
What our servers record
Our servers log which endpoint was asked for, whether it worked, how many bytes it returned, and the app or browser making the request. They do not log your IP address. They do not log the map area you were viewing: that request is answered from memory and the coordinates are discarded before anything reaches disk.
In place of an address, each line carries a scrambled code derived from it using a secret that changes every day. It cannot be turned back into an address, and today's code for a person is unrelated to tomorrow's, so we can count how many people used the app today without being able to say who they were, or connect them to yesterday.
Requests that are neither our app nor our own web map (scripts, scrapers and crawlers) are logged with a coarse network range instead. Noticing when someone is hammering the service is the reason a log exists at all, and those requests are not a person we have made this promise to.
This website counts page views the same anonymised way, along with the site that linked you here, so we can tell whether anyone is arriving. We use no third-party analytics service: the counting is done by our own web server and the numbers never leave this machine. The policy and terms pages are excluded entirely. Reading this page is not recorded anywhere.
Requests are rate-limited per IP address, which requires holding an address briefly in memory. That record is discarded within about a minute and is never written to disk.
One thing is stored: a rolling 24-hour list of aircraft that have broadcast an emergency squawk, so the app can show recent emergencies rather than only those it happened to be running for. Each entry is the aircraft's own broadcast and the time our server saw it. It records nothing about who was watching: no address, no location, no device. It would look identical if nobody had opened the app at all.
Other services the app talks to
Some features need data we do not hold ourselves.
- Apple: Sign in with Apple, and subscriptions through the App Store. Apple's privacy policy governs these. We never receive your payment details.
- planespotters.net: aircraft photographs. The aircraft's hex code is sent; nothing about you is. Photographs are loaded from their image servers.
- adsbdb.com: flight route lookups. The flight's callsign is sent; nothing about you is.
- airplanes.live: the community network the aircraft data comes from. The app contacts it directly in two cases: to check a feeder ID you have entered, and as a fallback source if our own backend is unreachable. As with any direct internet request, your device's IP address is visible to them in those cases. Only the feeder ID you typed is sent; nothing else about you is.
The photo and route lookups above are relayed through our backend, so those services see our server rather than your device, and our backend does not log the request.
Maps and weather
The map and the weather radar are served from our own infrastructure. Map imagery is rendered here from OpenStreetMap data; radar frames are produced here from NOAA/NWS data. No third-party map or tile provider receives any request from your device, and the map styles reference no external hosts at all.
Aircraft data
Aircraft positions shown in the app come from ADS-B, which aircraft broadcast publicly and unencrypted. It is information about aircraft, not about you.
Children
This app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Given the above, there is no personal information being collected from anyone.
Selling and sharing
We do not sell your information, and we do not share it beyond what is described on this page. There is no advertising in the app.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, the effective date above will change and the updated version will appear at this address.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or about this policy: blake@hughesit.us.