Trust
Privacy and your location
Short version. Your observatory's location is never published and never shown to other members. Other people see your display name, an optional country, and your totals. Nothing else.
Your location
SITELAT,SITELONG,SITEELEVandOBSERVERfrom your files are never published, never shown to any member, and never returned by our API. The upload service refuses a header that contains them.- The N.I.N.A. plugin removes them from the copy it uploads, by default. A project owner can require that. Your original files are not touched.
- The standalone uploader always removes them, the other names capture software uses for them, and horizon coordinates such as altitude, azimuth and airmass (which give your position away just as well), from every header of the copy it uploads, including the image inside a compressed
.fzfile. The browser upload page (Upload frames on a project) removes the same cards the same way, shows you what it found before anything is sent, and keeps them only if you choose to and the project allows it. - If you switch stripping off, the original header stays inside your stored raw file, in private storage. Only you can download it, and the owner can only if you allowed owner raw download for that project.
- What the stacks do show is where the target is on the sky, not where you are.
What other people see
| Who | Sees |
|---|---|
| Anyone with a project link | Previews, per-filter counts and hours, median star width, and a leaderboard of display names with an optional country and hours. For public and unlisted projects. |
| Members of a project | The same, plus the activity feed, and gold masters under the project's licence. |
| The project owner | Members' display names, roles and totals; the verdict on each frame. Raw frames only for members who opted in. |
| Nobody but you | Your email address, your account name, and your location. |
What we store
- Account: name, email address, and a salted hash of your password. Sessions use a cookie that scripts cannot read.
- Per project: your display name, optional country, filter mapping, accepted terms version, storage use.
- Frames: raw uploads in private storage while a project is active; calibrated and registered copies as a cache; gold masters kept indefinitely. After a project is archived its raw frames are deleted after 60 days unless the owner chose to keep them.
- Analytics: none beyond what our servers must log to run the service.
Deleting your data
You can ask for your account to be deleted. It removes your personal data and withdraws your frames from the next gold stack. Withdrawn raw files are deleted after seven days. Published previews that already include your frames are replaced the next time the project's stacks are rebuilt.