Privacy policy

Email pass alerts

If you sign up for alerts we store your email address, the place you entered (its name and coordinates), and when you subscribed — nothing else. It is used solely to send the ISS pass alerts you asked for. Signup is double opt-in: we send nothing beyond a single confirmation email until you verify. Every email contains an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing deletes your subscription from our database — it isn't kept on a "suppression list" or reused in any way.

Anonymous visit statistics

To know roughly how many people use the site and from which countries, we set a cookie called sti_vid containing a random identifier. It is not linked to your email address or anything else about you — it's a coin flip with no name attached. Alongside it we record the country your visit came from, derived from your IP address at our hosting provider's network edge; the IP address itself is never stored. Per-visitor presence data is deleted automatically after 24 hours; only daily per-country totals are kept.

Google Analytics

Like most websites we use Google Analytics to understand which pages are useful and where visitors come from. It sets its own cookies and is governed by Google's privacy policy. If you use an ad blocker that blocks analytics, the site works exactly the same without it.

Cookies

Who processes the data

The site runs on infrastructure from a small number of vendors, each of which processes data only to provide their service to us: Vercel (hosting and the country lookup), Upstash (database where subscriptions and visit counts live), Resend (delivers the alert emails), and Google (analytics). We never sell, rent, or share your information beyond that.

Your choices

Unsubscribe from alerts anytime with the link in any email — that deletes your data immediately. For anything else (including asking what we hold about you, or having it deleted), email hello@spottheiss.com and we'll sort it out. Since we hold no accounts or payment details, there's usually very little to delete.

Changes

If what the site collects ever changes — for example, if we add affiliate links to spotting gear — this page will be updated first, with the effective date above.