In short
- No accounts, no sign-up, no newsletter.
- We count page views without cookies and without keeping your IP address.
- The place you choose in a tool is saved on your device. It goes to our server only to work out the answer.
- We plan to show ads from Google AdSense, which uses cookies. No ad code runs on the site yet.
- We don't sell information about you.
What we count, and what we don't
We count visits so we know which tools people use and where our readers are. We count pages, not people. When you open a page, our server records:
- the page (for example /tools/moon), without anything after a "?"
- your country and your state, province or region (for example "Brazil, São Paulo"), as Cloudflare works it out from your connection
- the kind of device (phone, tablet or computer) and the browser and system family (for example "Chrome on Android"), not the exact versions
- the network your connection comes from, stored as the number that identifies the provider (for example a home internet provider or a cloud server company), and whether the visit looks like a robot, only so robots can be left out of the counts
- the time
We never record your IP address, your city, your exact location, your browser's full identity string or the page you came from. This counting uses no cookies and stores nothing on your device, and nothing in it can tell us who you are. For a visit that looks like a robot we also keep the name of its network, never for people. These records are kept for three months.
We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits without cookies and without following you from site to site.
Hosting and server logs
The site runs on Cloudflare. As with any website, Cloudflare's servers see your IP address when they send you a page, and use it to keep the site fast and to block attacks. Our own request logs are kept for a few days and are used only to find and fix faults. They hold technical details of each request, such as its address and time; the address of a tool's request can include the coordinates you chose, for example for satellite passes. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.
Your location and settings
Tools need a place to work out the sky. You can pick a city, type coordinates, click on a map or let your browser share your position (it asks you first). The place you choose, and settings such as your telescope and camera, are saved in your browser's storage on your device so you don't have to enter them again. They are not cookies and we can't read them from our side.
When a tool needs your coordinates to work out an answer (satellite passes, the weather forecast, transits), your browser sends them to our server for that request. For transits, our server passes them on to the transit-prediction service we run at Render.
The site also keeps a small visit counter in your browser so it offers "install the app" only from your second visit. To remove all of this, clear this site's data in your browser.
Other services your browser talks to
Some parts of a page come straight from other companies, which then see your IP address, as with any web request:
- map pictures, from Esri (and OpenStreetMap on the transit map);
- place search: when you type a city name, your browser sends that text to Open-Meteo.
Weather forecasts are fetched by our server from Open-Meteo, so Open-Meteo sees our server and the coordinates, not you.
Advertising (Google AdSense)
OrbitaSky is free, and we plan to pay for it with ads from Google AdSense. No ad code runs on the site yet; when it does, this is how it will work.
Google and its partners use cookies and similar technology to show ads and to measure them. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to show ads based on your earlier visits to this website and to other websites. Google's advertising cookies let it and its partners show you ads based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
You can turn off personalised ads in Google's My Ad Center, and opt out of personalised ads from many other companies at aboutads.info (or youronlinechoices.eu in Europe). You will still see ads, but they will be less tailored to you.
In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, a consent message from Google (a Google-certified consent tool) asks you before any cookies are used for ads. You can change your choice at any time with the privacy settings link the message leaves on the page.
Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services and Google's privacy policy. Google reports only totals to us: we can't see who you are or which ads you saw.
Your choices and rights
Because we keep no record linked to you, there is usually nothing about you for us to show, correct or delete. What is saved in your browser is yours to delete at any time. For Google's advertising data, use Google's controls above. If you live in the EEA, the UK or another place with data-protection law, you have rights over your personal data, including the right to complain to your data-protection authority.
Contact
A contact address for questions about this page is being set up and will appear here.
Changes to this page
When the site starts doing something new with information, we update this page first and change the date at the top.