Privacy Policy

Overview

AeroPlanimetry ("we", "our", or "the site") is a free online GIS map viewer operated at aeroplanimetry.com. This policy explains what data is collected when you use the site, who receives it, and your rights under applicable privacy law including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Data We Collect

AeroPlanimetry does not ask for or store your name, email address, or any account details, and it keeps no database of visitors. The technical data below does pass through the site's infrastructure when you use it:

• Hosting logs. Our hosting provider, Vercel, may keep standard access logs: your IP address, the requested address (path and query string), the time, the HTTP status, and your browser's user-agent. These logs are used for operating and securing the site and are governed by Vercel's Privacy Policy. Because searches and map clicks are sent to our server in the request address, the text you search for and the coordinates you click can appear in these logs.
• Page-view statistics. The map pages and the Resources page load Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views without using cookies. It records the page address, the referring site, approximate location (country, region, and city), device type, and browser and operating system. Visitors are told apart by a hash of the request that Vercel discards after 24 hours, and the statistics are aggregated. Because it sets no cookies, this counter is not controlled by the cookie banner. See Vercel's Web Analytics privacy documentation.
• Searches, clicks, and lookups. When you use the Search box, the Query Feature, or the elevation and address shown in the click popup, the text you typed or the coordinates you clicked are sent to our server, which passes them to the provider that answers (see Third-Party Services). We do not store them ourselves.
• Abuse prevention. To stop automated abuse, search, elevation, address, street-level photo, and wildfire-page lookups limit how often one visitor can use them. The limiter may keep your IP address in a counter for about one minute in a Redis service run by Upstash (Upstash's Privacy Policy).
• Email. If you email us (Contact Developer or Report Issues), we receive what you send, including your email address, and use it only to reply and to fix the problem.

Everything else you do on the map stays in your browser: the layers you switch on, drawings and measurements (which are not saved), and files you load with Load KML/KMZ, which your browser reads and never uploads. If you use Zoom to My Location, your browser asks for permission first and your position is used only to centre the map; the map images for that area are then requested like any other view.

Third-Party Services

Map layers come from many government agencies, libraries, and other data providers, and the site relies on a few other services. Whenever your browser or our server contacts one of them, that provider receives ordinary connection data plus the request itself, and its own privacy policy applies. There are two routes for map data:

• Through our server. Esri's basemaps, imagery (including Wayback), place search, elevation, and address lookups, the New Zealand layers from LINZ, and many other layers (for example Natural Resources Canada's boundary layers, Statistics Canada, USGS, USDA, the National Interagency Fire Center (current wildfire perimeters) and InciWeb (the links to wildfire incident pages), NOAA including its aurora forecast, lightning-strike lookups, the U.S. EPA (ecoregion maps and lookups), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries (waterfowl flyway, refuge boundary, refuge wilderness, and critical-habitat outlines and lines), the orbit data of the space stations (CelesTrak), the lists of traffic cameras (Transport for London, Fintraffic, Statens vegvesen, DriveBC, the City of Calgary, Ontario 511, Caltrans, the City of Austin and Transport for NSW), the positions of aircraft in flight (adsb.lol), rocket launch schedules (The Space Devs), live vehicle positions in Norway, the Helsinki region, the Netherlands, South East Queensland and Boston (Entur, HSL, OVapi, TransLink and the MBTA), live road traffic in Finland, the Netherlands and Norway (Fintraffic, NDW and Statens vegvesen), live bikeshare station availability (the open data feeds of the bikeshare operators), the positions and picture addresses of street-level photos (Mapillary and Panoramax), the dates and cloud cover of 30 m satellite pictures at a spot (NASA's CMR catalogue), the radio station directory (Radio Browser), tide-gauge sea level trends, and coral reef heat-stress maps (the latter hosted by the University of Hawaii's PacIOOS), FEMA, the Uruguayan IDEuy service, and the Antarctic place-name lookups of the Australian Antarctic Data Centre) are requested by our server on your behalf. The provider sees our server's address, not yours, together with the map area, search text, or coordinates being requested. Esri receives these requests under the site's own Esri account. See Esri's Privacy Statement and LINZ's Privacy Statement.
• Directly from your browser. Some layers load their map images straight from the provider's server, which can then see your IP address, your browser details, and the area you are viewing. This happens only for layers you switch on, and includes, for example, NASA GIBS (satellite, rainfall, and climate imagery), Global Forest Watch (tree cover loss tiles), the USGS National Map (including its Protected Areas Database map tiles), NOAA (including its nowCOAST lightning and satellite-mosaic maps), Environment and Climate Change Canada (weather forecast and radar layers), Natural Resources Canada (the Toporama and CanVec maps), EUMETSAT (Meteosat imagery), GEBCO (bathymetry), the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (surface-water tiles hosted on Google Cloud Storage, so Google's servers also see the request), several national and regional mapping agencies in Europe, Asia, Japan, Australia, and the USA, EMODnet, Macrostrat, the David Rumsey Map Center's historical map tiles (served from a Geogarage-hosted tile server), a few layers hosted on ArcGIS Online (USFWS critical habitat), the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota (Antarctic Landsat mosaic, terrain images, and USGS topographic maps), the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (Antarctic place-name markers), the Hong Kong Lands Department (Hong Kong base map, aerial imagery and place-name tiles), and OpenStreetMap-based tile servers (OpenSeaMap, CyclOSM, Waymarked Trails, Humanitarian OSM, OpenTopoMap). The traffic camera layers load each camera’s picture straight from the agency that runs the camera (Transport for London via Amazon S3, Fintraffic, Statens vegvesen, DriveBC, the City of Calgary, Ontario 511, Caltrans, the City of Austin or Transport for NSW) when you click a camera, without telling the agency which page you came from. The Street-Level Photos layer loads a photo you click straight from the picture servers of the service it came from: Mapillary (part of Meta) or the Panoramax instance that hosts the photo (for example the OpenStreetMap France servers). That server then sees your IP address and browser details, without being told which page you came from; its own terms and privacy policy apply. The World Radio Stations layer plays a station straight from its broadcaster’s server when you press Listen, so that broadcaster sees your IP address and browser details; its own terms apply. The Historical page also loads its scanned Library of Congress maps directly from the Library. Each provider's own privacy policy applies.
• Script libraries. jsDelivr serves the MapML mapping library on every page. Cloudflare's cdnjs serves four libraries that load only when you need them: html2canvas (Save PNG and Print Map), JSZip (loading a KMZ file), Leaflet (opening a scanned historical document), and satellite.js (the Space Stations layer). These services can log your IP address and browser details.
• Share Map. The Share Map button builds a link in your browser (the place, zoom and layers of your map). If you choose “Email this link” it is handed to your own email program, where you choose the recipient; if you copy it or use your device’s share sheet it goes wherever you send it. This site does not send, see or store the link or the recipient.
• Hosting and counters. Vercel (hosting and Web Analytics) and, where the limiter is active, Upstash, as described above.
• Google Analytics, loaded through Google Tag Manager, only if you click Accept (see Analytics below). Governed by Google's Privacy Policy.
• Email services. Report Issues can open a message in Gmail or Outlook on the web if you choose them; what you write goes to that provider, not to us, until you send it.

Cookies & Local Storage

AeroPlanimetry itself does not set any cookies. It saves a few small items in your browser's storage so that it can remember your choices; they never leave your browser:

• cookie_consent (local storage) — whether you accepted or declined non-essential cookies.
• ap_lang (local storage) — your chosen language.
• ap_welcomed (local storage) — that you chose "Don't show this again" on the welcome guide.
• ap_mobile_notice_off (local storage) — that you chose "Don't show this message again" on the note shown to phone users at the start of the welcome guide.
• ap_shown (session storage) — that the welcome guide has already been shown in this browser session.

If you click Accept, Google Analytics sets its own cookies (named _ga and _ga_ followed by the measurement ID), which Google states last up to two years. To change your choice, use the "Cookie Settings" link in the page footer: it reopens the banner. Accepting starts Google Analytics right away; declining stops it from loading on later page loads. Cookies that were already set stay in your browser until you delete them in your browser's settings.

Advertising

AeroPlanimetry is intended to be supported by advertising, but no ads are shown yet and no advertising script is loaded: the boxes marked "Advertisement" on the pages are placeholders. Before advertising starts, this policy will be updated to name the ad network and explain what it collects, and ad scripts will load only after you accept cookies.

Analytics

Two analytics tools are used to understand aggregate usage (for example which map regions are most popular and how fast pages load) so that the site can be improved. No analytics data is sold to third parties.

• Vercel Web Analytics runs on the map pages and the Resources page and uses no cookies, as described under Data We Collect.
• Google Analytics 4 (measurement ID: G-KQPY72S43D) loads only after you click Accept on the cookie banner. It uses cookies and reports usage data such as pages visited, session duration, device and browser information, and approximate location (country and city). We do not use it to identify individual visitors. You may opt out at any time with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

Your Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the following rights regarding personal data:

• GDPR (EEA/UK): Right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and the right to object. You also have the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of prior processing.
• CCPA (California): Right to know what personal information is collected, right to delete, and right to opt out of the sale of personal information. AeroPlanimetry does not sell personal information.
• All users: You can change your cookie choice at any time via the "Cookie Settings" link in the footer.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at the address below. Because we do not maintain a user database, we may ask you to identify which service holds your data (for example our hosting provider or Google) and direct you to that provider's data subject request process.

Data Retention

We do not keep personal data in a database of our own. Vercel keeps its server logs and analytics statistics according to its own retention schedule, and the rate-limit counter, where used, expires after about a minute. Google Analytics data and cookies are kept for the periods set out in Google's policies, and the items in your browser's storage stay until you clear your site data or cookies.

Children's Privacy

AeroPlanimetry is not directed at children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data via this site, please contact us so we can take appropriate action.

Policy Changes

We may update this policy from time to time, in particular before advertising is switched on. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page shows when it last changed. Continued use of the site after a policy update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

Contact

For privacy-related questions or to exercise your data rights, please contact us: