The website
- No accounts, no sign-in, no profile. Nothing you do on planetatlas.org is tied to a person, because there is no person record to tie it to.
- Analytics are self-hosted and cookieless. Page views are counted by an Umami instance we run at analytics.planetatlas.org. It records the page, referrer, rough screen size, browser and country. It sets no cookie, assigns no persistent identifier, and cannot follow you to any other website.
- Imagery is fetched by your browser, directly. This is worth being plain about: there is no server in the middle. When you fly over Mars, your device asks NASA's and the USGS's public archives for those tiles itself, so those organisations see your IP address and the tiles you asked for, exactly as if you had typed their URL. Their privacy practices are their own.
- Local storage stays local. Your text-size preference, and in the app your subscription status, are kept in the browser's own storage on your device. They are never transmitted to us.
The iOS and Android app
The app is the same atlas, packaged to run offline-capable on a phone. It adds one thing the website does not have: a subscription.
- Purchases are handled by Apple and Google. We never see your card, your billing address, or your store account. Payment happens entirely inside the App Store or Google Play.
- RevenueCat records what you bought. We use RevenueCat to check whether a subscription is active. It receives a randomly generated anonymous app user ID, the store receipt for your purchase, and basic device and app version information. It does not receive your name or email address, and we do not link that ID to any identity. RevenueCat's own policy is at revenuecat.com/privacy.
- No advertising or attribution SDKs. The app contains no advertising network, no tracking SDK, and requests no advertising identifier. It does not ask for your location, contacts, photos, microphone or camera, because it has no use for any of them.
- Deleting the app deletes what is on the device. The only thing that survives is the purchase record held by Apple or Google, which is what lets "Restore purchases" work when you reinstall.
Children and classrooms
The activities on this site are written for grades 5–12, so we assume children use it. No personal information is collected from anyone, of any age: there is no sign-up, no free-text field that reaches us, and no behavioural profile. Nothing here is directed at building an audience for advertising.
Your rights, and how to use them
Because we hold no personal data about you, there is generally nothing for us to show you or delete. If you have made a purchase and want the anonymous record of it removed, write to [email protected] with the approximate date and store, and we will delete the corresponding RevenueCat customer record. Note that this also ends the subscription's ability to restore on a new device.
Cancelling a subscription is done through your store account, not through us — see the subscription terms.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and the previous wording remains in the site's public git history.