Privacy policy

Email pass alerts

If you sign up for alerts we store your email address, the place you entered (its name and coordinates), when you subscribed, your confirmation status, and delivery records needed to prevent duplicate alerts. Signup is double opt-in: pass alerts start after you verify your address. Every email contains an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing removes your subscription from our database and stops future alerts. Temporary pending messages used for safe retries expire after two days. Our email provider may retain delivery and suppression records under its own privacy policy.

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; our visit-counting database does not store the IP address itself. Per-visitor presence data is deleted automatically after 24 hours; only daily per-country totals are kept.

Location, forecasts and shared sightings

Your selected location and display preferences can be saved in this browser. Device location is requested only when you choose to use it. Forecast requests send coordinates to Open-Meteo. Town searches use OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service through our server, and the map loads tiles from Esri. These services receive the information needed to answer those requests, including network connection information. You can clear saved preferences using your browser's site-data controls.

A shared sighting link includes a pass time and coordinates rounded to a 0.1-degree grid, but no email address or saved place name. Anyone with that link can see the approximate location, and the URL may appear in page analytics. Calendar downloads contain the selected pass details and a link to recheck them.

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, performance and visit analytics, and the country lookup), Upstash (database where subscriptions and visit counts live), Resend (delivers the alert emails), and Google (analytics). Location and map providers are described above. These providers may retain operational records under their own policies. We do not sell or rent your information.

Your choices

Unsubscribe from alerts anytime with the link in any email — that removes your subscription. 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.