Privacy Policy

1.Who runs Flight Atlas

Flight Atlas (flightatlas.org) is published by an independent individual creator. For anything related to this policy or your data, contact apostructura@gmail.com — we respond within 30 days.

2.Data you give us

Account: when you sign up we store your email address, username, first and last name, a bcrypt hash of your password (we never store the password itself), and which Atlas site you created the account on. We use this data to operate your account, and for nothing else.

Contact form: if you write to us through the contact form we store your email address, the subject and your message, so we can reply.

Saved content: with an account you can save views to a personal dashboard. Chart Builder charts you save (saving is a Premium feature) are stored the same way as other views. A premium subscription lets you schedule automatic screenshots of those views. Screenshots are stored at unlisted URLs on our file storage. They contain chart data, not personal data. Every screenshot is deleted automatically 60 days after it was captured, image file included.

Forum: with a verified account you can post comments, reply, report comments and mark launches you saw. Comments are public and show your current username and the date. Deleting a comment removes its text; a comment with replies keeps its place as "Deleted". Marks stay private unless you choose to show them, and a launch shows totals from five marks, without names. The site never shows who reported a comment. If you delete your account, your comments stay, shown as "Account deleted", and we no longer keep which account wrote them. To remove one, delete it first, or afterwards email apostructura@gmail.com with a link to it.

Email: we send transactional email (account verification, password resets, subscription renewal reminders, and account deletion confirmations). Anyone with a verified address can turn on an optional Monday digest for up to 3 saved views; a premium subscription raises that to 10 views and a daily send. The digest may include the latest screenshot of each view. These emails are off until you enable them, and every such email has a link to stop that view or all view emails. No marketing, no advertising lists, and your address is never shared.

3.Payments

Premium subscriptions are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers; we store only your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and the subscription status and dates. Subscriptions renew automatically; we email you a reminder before each renewal, and you can cancel anytime from your profile page.

4.Traffic measurement

We measure traffic on our own servers, at the network edge, rather than with third-party tracking scripts. For each request we record: the page path, the referring site, your country and city (derived from your connection by our hosting provider), your browser family and device class, and the time of the request. A small first-party script on the page tells the same server the first time you move the mouse, press a key or touch the screen there (only that it happened, not what you did) and when you open another page of the site through an in-site link; it sends only that page path and sets no cookie. While a page is open and in view, the same script also tells the server about once a minute that it is still open, and says so when you switch away, close it or stop using it for a few minutes; this shows how many people are on the site at that moment and sends nothing else. We also count the language your browser asks for, which page you went to next, and a few named actions (creating an account and the part of the site it started from, starting a checkout, searching, saving a favorite, sharing or capturing a chart, downloading a file, with its file name, following a link to another website, with its domain only, opening Walk mode in the Rocket Garden, being asked for a free account and by which feature, and adding the launch calendar). These are tallies, never a record of what one person did.

When you are signed in, we record which days you use each Atlas site, under one code derived from your account number, to count active accounts and accounts used on more than one site. We delete these records after 90 days, or when you delete your account.

To count visits and returning visitors without identifying anyone, each visitor is assigned a pseudonymous identifier: a salted SHA-256 hash computed from the site, your IP address and your user-agent string. Your raw IP address is not stored by the analytics — only the pseudonymous hash. Daily aggregate counters are kept for 90 days. Once a month is over, its totals are folded into a monthly summary (counts by page, country, referring site, kind of visitor and active accounts, plus an estimate of how many different visitors there were) that is kept long-term and holds nothing about any individual visit or visitor. Per-visit session records expire after 48 hours, the daily list of visits (hashed identifiers) after 3 days, the record of who is on the site right now (the hashed identifier and a time) is deleted within three minutes of your last page in view, and the per-visitor visit count (the hashed identifier and a number) expires 90 days after the last visit. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and keeping it secure (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

The site also uses Vercel Web Analytics, a cookie-free, aggregated page-view counter provided by our hosting platform. We do not use Google Analytics or any third-party advertising or cross-site tracker.

5.Cookies

The only cookies Flight Atlas sets are strictly necessary authentication cookies, created when you log in (they keep you signed in and are httpOnly). Browsing without an account sets no cookies at all. Some display preferences, and Forum drafts you have not posted, are kept in your browser’s local storage and are not sent to us. Because we use no non-essential cookies, there is no cookie banner.

6.AI usage

The launch descriptions shown on Flight Atlas are drafted from public sources and checked against launch data, on a daily schedule. An AI assistant also helps the site’s administrator query the launch database. AI systems work on rocket-launch data only: the database tables holding user accounts, contact messages and Forum data are technically excluded from anything an AI system can read, and your personal data is never sent to an AI service.

7.Third parties (processors)

These providers process data on our behalf, under their own data-processing agreements: Vercel (Vercel Inc., USA — hosting, edge network, web analytics, and file storage for screenshots), Neon (Neon Inc., USA — the PostgreSQL database holding accounts and launch data), Stripe (Stripe Inc., USA — payments), Resend (Resend Inc., USA — transactional email), and Upstash (Upstash Inc., USA — the datastore for the aggregated traffic counters, hashed visitor identifiers and account-day records described above).

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone else. Launch data itself comes from public sources such as The Space Devs and contains no personal data.

8.Data retention and deletion

Your account data is kept until you delete your account, which you can do yourself at any time from your profile page. Deletion is immediate and permanent: it cancels any active subscription, and removes your account, saved filters, account-day records, your Forum marks, reports and settings, and scheduled screenshots, both the database records and the stored image files. Scheduled screenshots are deleted automatically 60 days after capture in any case, and deleting a saved filter deletes its screenshots straight away. Analytics counters expire on the 90-day schedule above. Forum comments stay until they are deleted, including after you delete your account (see above).

9.Your rights

Under the UK GDPR, the EU GDPR and similar laws you can access, rectify, export, and erase your personal data, object to processing, and lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority: the ICO in the UK (ico.org.uk) or the authority where you live. Most of this you can do yourself from your profile page; for anything else, write to apostructura@gmail.com.

10.Hosting (legal notice)

Flight Atlas is published by ApoStructura, an individual based in the United Kingdom. Host: Vercel Inc., 340 S Lemon Ave #4133, Walnut, CA 91789, United States (vercel.com).

11.Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page will be updated. The current version always lives at flightatlas.org/privacy.