Privacy policy

The short version

• No account is needed and no advertising or tracking cookies are set.
• Your precise location, if you share it, never leaves your browser.
• If you sign up for alerts we keep your email until you unsubscribe.
• We keep simple, anonymous page view statistics to see what people use.
• We never sell or share your data with anyone for their own use.

Your location

The “near me” button on the aurora pages asks your browser for your position. Your browser will ask you first and you can say no. If you say yes, the coordinates are used on your device to pick the closest city from our list, and then discarded. They are not sent to our servers and not stored anywhere.

Separately, our hosting provider tells us which country a request came from, based on its network address. We keep that two letter country code with page view statistics and with alert signups, so we know roughly where our visitors are. We do not keep the network address itself.

Alert signups

When you sign up for aurora alerts by email we store your email address, the page you signed up from, the place you asked to be alerted about, your country, and the date. We use this only to send you the alerts you asked for. Emails are sent through an email delivery service that processes your address on our behalf.

Every email has an unsubscribe link. Using it stops the emails at once. Write to us if you want your address deleted entirely.

If you join the Telegram alert channel we store the chat id and username Telegram gives us, plus your alert preferences, so the bot can message you. Blocking or leaving the bot stops that.

Page view statistics

We record which pages are viewed, when, the page that linked to us, the kind of browser used, and the country, in our own database and through our hosting provider’s analytics. None of this identifies you. There are no user ids, no fingerprints, and no cookies. The referring page is remembered in your browser’s session storage for the length of one visit so we can credit where a visit came from, and it is gone when you close the tab.

Cookies and browser storage

The public site sets no cookies. It uses your browser’s local storage for small preferences, like the theme, and session storage for the referrer described above. Signing in to the admin area sets a session cookie there and nowhere else.

Who else sees data

The site is hosted, its database is stored, and its emails are sent by third party service providers. Telegram messages go through Telegram. Each of these processes data only to provide the service to us. We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or anyone else for their own purposes.

The space weather itself comes from the public sources on the data sources page. Fetching it does not send them anything about you.

Your rights

You can ask to see, correct or delete anything we hold about you at any time. Email higalaxos@gmail.com from the address in question and we will handle it promptly. If you are in the European Economic Area or United Kingdom, the legal basis for alert emails is your consent, and for the statistics it is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used.

Children

GalaxOS is not aimed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you think a child has signed up for alerts, write to us and we will remove the address.

Changes

If we start collecting something new, this page will say so and the date at the top will change.