Privacy Policy

Last updated August 22, 2026

Stowaway shows you the real sky above you and lets you ride along with what is crossing it. Doing that needs to know roughly where you are, and very little else. This policy explains what is collected, why it is needed, and what is never done with it.

Introduction

Stowaway (“we”, “us”, “our”) operates the website and web application at stowaway.live (the “Service”). This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use the Service. It applies to everyone who visits, whether or not they pay for anything.

Information We Collect

The Service has no accounts. There is no username to create, no password to forget, and no profile stored about you. What we handle is limited to the following:

• Approximate location — either the location your browser provides when you grant permission, or a place you type in yourself. This is what decides which sky to draw, which aircraft are overhead, and what the weather and light should look like. Sharing it is optional. The Service is better when it knows where you are standing, because then the sky it draws is the one genuinely outside your window — but it is not required. Decline the permission and the Service still works: on a first visit it opens on an approximate, city-level location that our hosting provider derives from your network connection — used only to choose a starting sky, never stored, and replaced the moment you pick a place or grant the permission — and you can search for any place in the world by name and look at the sky there instead. The permission belongs to your browser rather than to us, so you can grant, refuse, or withdraw it at any time in your browser’s settings, and nothing here will stop working if you do.
• Boarding presence — while you ride along with a craft, other viewers can see that someone is aboard it: an anonymous count, held only for as long as you are riding. Public boarding feeds — such as the ticker on our live stream — may also say which country your connection appeared to come from, as in “Someone from India just joined flight AA278”. That sentence is the whole of it, and it is worth being precise about what it is not: we are not tracking you. The country is derived from your IP address by our hosting provider at the moment you board, it is a country only — never a city, a region, or anything finer — and it is never stored together with your IP address, your location, or anything else that could identify you. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to attach it to. If you would rather not appear at all, turn on Hide my rides from others under Settings → Privacy, and you are left out of the counts and the feeds entirely, on that device, until you say otherwise.
• Billing information — if you choose to support the project, your email address and payment details are collected by our payment processor. We never see or store your full card details. We receive a record that a customer is entitled to paid access, along with the email address used.
• Diagnostics and analytics — how the Service is used and how well it performs: which features are opened, what your device is capable of rendering, and errors it runs into. There is no way to test against every phone and graphics chip in the world, so this is how we find out the sky failed to draw on one of them.
• Questions you type — if you support the project, you can ask about the sky in your own words, through a feature called Roger. The question you type is sent to us and on to an AI model provider so it can be answered, together with your approximate location — rounded, before it leaves your browser, to about a kilometer — your local time, and what your browser is currently tracking overhead. Rounding it is deliberate: it is enough to answer “what just flew over my house” and not enough to be an address. Your questions are not used to train models, and neither the question nor the answer is stored once the answer has been given.
• Technical data — information sent automatically by any browser making a request, such as your IP address, browser type, and referring page.

How We Use Your Information

• To draw the sky where you are and show what is genuinely passing overhead.
• To answer a question you have typed, and to carry out what it asks for — finding a flight, moving your view, putting you aboard a craft.
• To provide, maintain, and improve the Service, and to work out what is worth building next.
• To process payments and to grant, restore, and verify paid access.
• To detect, investigate, and prevent abuse, fraud, and excessive automated use.
• To respond to you when you contact us for support.
• To comply with legal obligations.

What We Do Not Do

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. We do not run advertising on the Service, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not track you across other websites. We do use third-party services for diagnostics, analytics, payments, and delivering the Service itself, as described below — but that is to make the Service work, not to monetise you.

We do not use your questions to train AI models, and we do not keep them. Questions are routed only to providers that undertake not to retain what is sent to them, and we log nothing of a question or its answer ourselves — only how many tokens it took and what it cost, which is what tells us whether the feature can pay for itself.

Third-Party Services

The Service depends on outside providers. We describe them by category rather than by name, so that this policy stays accurate as providers are added, replaced, or dropped. The categories we use are:

• Payment processing — to take payments and manage subscriptions.
• Email delivery — to send you service messages, such as returning a lost access key.
• Analytics and diagnostics — to understand usage and to find faults.
• Hosting and content delivery — to serve the Service to your browser, and to fetch and cache data from the sources below on its behalf so that the same request is not made twice.
• Live data providers — the sources of aircraft positions, satellite orbits, weather, terrain and imagery, and reference information about aircraft and places on the ground.
• AI model providers — to answer questions you type. Requests are routed through an intermediary that lets us change which model answers without changing the Service, and are restricted to providers that do not retain what is sent to them.

One thing here is worth stating plainly. Some of this data reaches you through infrastructure we run ourselves, including a content delivery network that fetches from the original source on your behalf and caches the result. Other requests your browser makes straight to the provider. Which is which varies by the kind of data and changes over time as the Service is tuned, so rather than draw a line that will not stay true: assume that whoever answers a request — our own infrastructure or an outside provider — receives what any web request carries, including your IP address and the approximate area you are looking at. Several of these are free public services used under their own terms rather than companies under contract to us, and their own privacy policies govern what they do with a request that reaches them.

Cookies and Local Storage

The Service stores a small amount of data in your own browser: your display preferences, the last place you looked at, and — if you support the project — your access key, so you do not have to enter it every visit. This stays on your device and can be cleared at any time through your browser’s settings. Our analytics and payment providers may also set cookies or similar identifiers in the course of doing their jobs.

Data Retention

We keep information only for as long as it is needed. Billing records are retained by our payment processor for as long as your subscription is active and afterwards for as long as tax and accounting law requires. Analytics data is retained in aggregate. Data held in your own browser stays until you clear it. Questions you type are retained for no time at all — they exist for as long as it takes to answer them, are not written to any log or database of ours, and the last two exchanges are held in your browser’s own memory so that a follow-up question makes sense. They are never written to storage on your device or anywhere else, and closing or reloading the page discards them. You may request deletion of information we hold about you as described below.

Data Security

We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information, and we deliberately hold as little of it as possible — the strongest protection being data that was never collected. However, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Request correction of inaccurate data.
• Request deletion of your data.
• Object to or restrict how your data is processed.
• Request a copy of your data in a portable format.
• Withdraw consent you have given, including your browser’s location permission, which you can revoke at any time in your browser’s settings.

To exercise any of these, contact us using the address at the end of this policy.

Children’s Privacy

The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will take steps to delete it.

International Visitors

The Service is operated from the United States, and the providers described above may process data in the United States and other countries. If you use the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information may be transferred to and processed in countries whose data protection laws differ from those of your own.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the revised policy on this page and update the “Last updated” date above. Material changes will be brought to your attention through the Service.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, or want to exercise any of the rights above, email support@stowaway.live.