Privacy

The map and these pages

• There is nothing to sign in to, and no page sets a cookie.
• There is no analytics script, no advertising, no tracking pixel and no social-media widget. Nothing from another company loads on these pages until you click it.
• The map keeps your own choices, such as a city you picked and a few display settings, in your browser's storage on your device. They are not sent to us.
• Some layers of the map ask a public data service for fresh numbers, for example NASA's picture of today's clouds. Your browser makes that request, as it would to open their page. Every source is on the Sources page.
• The pages are served by Amazon CloudFront, which keeps standard access logs: for each request, the network (IP) address, the page asked for, the time and the browser's name. They are kept for 30 days, privately, for security and to fix faults, and then deleted. We do not use them to track or profile anyone, they hold no cookie, and nothing in them is linked to a subscription.

Email updates: what is kept

If you subscribe, one record is kept for your address. It holds:

• your email address;
• the lists you picked: Space Radar news, the Journal, space games, sky alerts;
• your consent: when you asked, when you confirmed, the page you signed up on (its address without anything after a ?) and the version of this page you agreed to;
• a short history of those steps (asked, confirmed, changed, left), so we can show that you asked;
• a random number that makes the links in your mails work, and stops working when you leave.

It holds no name, no IP address, no location, and nothing about whether you opened a mail or clicked a link. We could not know: our mails have no tracking pixel and no image, and no link in them is rewritten.

Why

To send you what you asked for, and nothing else, and to be able to show that you asked. Nobody else gets the list: it is not sold, shared or used for advertising.

How it works, and how to leave

• Double opt-in. After you sign up we send one mail with a button. Nothing more is sent until you press it, and a request that is not confirmed is deleted after 48 hours.
• One-click unsubscribe. Every mail has an Unsubscribe link, and the List-Unsubscribe header that mail apps read for their own Unsubscribe button. No login, no survey, no "are you sure" page that asks twice.
• Preferences. Every mail links to a page where you change your lists; choosing none unsubscribes you.
• Erasure. That page also has an Erase button, which deletes your record at once.

How long it is kept

• While you are subscribed, the record stays.
• When you unsubscribe (or a mail to you bounces for good, or is marked as spam), your lists are emptied, every link in your old mails stops working, and the record is deleted 30 days later.
• When you erase it, it is deleted at once. The database's own backups age out within 35 days.
• To stop abuse, the service counts sign-up attempts per network for an hour or a day. It keeps a one-way, keyed scramble of the address (a hash it cannot turn back), never the address itself, and each count is deleted when its hour or day is over.

Who sends it, and who is responsible

The mail is sent through Amazon SES, and the record is kept in Amazon DynamoDB, both in Amazon Web Services' EU (Stockholm) region. Amazon processes them for us, as our service provider. Like every sender on SES, an address whose mail bounces for good or is reported as spam is also kept on Amazon's own list of addresses not to mail.

The controller of this data is the maintainer of the Space Radar project. To ask what is kept about you, to have it corrected or deleted, or with any other question, reply to any mail we sent you, or open an issue on GitHub (it needs a free GitHub account) (do not put your address in a public issue). You can also complain to your country's data protection authority.

Changes

This is version 2026-11-10 of this page. If what is kept ever changes, the version changes with it, and the new one is published here first. The code that does all of this is open: Sara-Managed-Projects/space-radar for the map and these pages.