Privacy Policy — Live Flight Tracker Radar

1. Who is responsible

The Live Flight Tracker Radar application, published on Google Play, is developed and operated by Rectu Marcin Tuzel, Jagodowa 4, Lubin, Poland. This privacy policy applies to that application — referred to below as "the app" — and to no other product.

Contact for any privacy matter: matituz@gmail.com, phone +48 737 489 001.

For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Rectu Marcin Tuzel is the data controller for the limited processing described below.

2. What the app is

Live Flight Tracker Radar is a watch face and companion app for Wear OS smartwatches. It shows real air traffic around your position as a radar display, using community ADS-B data from adsb.lol. An optional Android phone app exists solely to supply a position to watches that have no GPS receiver of their own.

3. Location data

Why we need it

A radar without a centre point cannot be drawn. Your position determines which aircraft are in range and how far away and in which direction each of them is.

Permissions requested

Precise location (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION), approximate location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION), and background location (ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION).

Why background location is required

A watch face is drawn by a background service, because that is what a watch face is — it updates while you are not inside the app. Since Android 10, an app without the background location permission receives no position at all in that situation. Without it, the watch face would say "searching for position" indefinitely and only work while the settings screen happened to be open. Background location is used for nothing else: there is no tracking, no location history, no geofencing, no movement profiling, and no transmission of your position to anyone other than as described in section 5.

Precision that leaves the device

Before your position is put into any network request, it is rounded to 0.01 degrees — a grid of roughly one kilometre. Our server therefore receives a neighbourhood, not an address. Your exact fix stays on the watch, where it is used to calculate the distance and bearing of each aircraft. This is a deliberate design decision: any web server records the requested address in its access log, and precise coordinates in a log would amount to a location history of every user.

If you refuse the permission

The watch face keeps telling the time and displays a short message explaining that it has no position. No aircraft are shown. Nothing else breaks.

Withdrawing consent

Revoke the location permission at any time in the system settings of your watch or phone. The app stops requesting a position immediately.

4. What we do not collect

Live Flight Tracker Radar does not collect, and has no technical means of collecting: your name, e-mail address, phone number, contacts, photos, files, messages, calendar, health or fitness data, advertising identifier, device identifiers, or any usage, behavioural or diagnostic telemetry.

The app contains no analytics library, no crash-reporting library, no advertising SDK, and no third-party tracking code of any kind. There is no user account and nothing to log in to.

5. What is sent over the network, and to whom

All connections are encrypted with HTTPS.

5.1 Our proxy server (operated by us)

The app talks to a single server that we run. It receives:

• your position rounded to about one kilometre, and the display radius you selected;
• map tile numbers (zoom, x, y) when the satellite watch face is in use;
• ICAO 24-bit transponder addresses of aircraft, in order to look up their type and operator;
• your IP address, which is inherent to any internet request and cannot be avoided.

The application server does not write request logs. IP addresses are used for one purpose — rate limiting, so that a single client cannot exhaust the service for everyone. For that purpose the address is hashed, kept in memory only, counted within a short time window, and discarded when the window ends. No list of user addresses is retained.

The web server in front of the application keeps conventional access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested path including the rounded coordinates, response status) for 7 days, for security, abuse prevention and fault diagnosis. They are deleted automatically afterwards and are not used for any other purpose.

5.2 adsb.lol — the source of flight data

Our server queries adsb.lol in fixed one-degree grid cells shared by all users in an area, rather than once per user. As a result, adsb.lol receives neither your position nor your IP address — it sees only our server asking about a region.

5.3 adsbdb.com — aircraft type and operator

Looked up by the aircraft's ICAO 24-bit transponder address only. This request contains no location data and is relayed by our server, so adsbdb.com does not see your IP address either.

5.4 Mapbox — satellite imagery

The outdoor watch face draws the radar over satellite imagery supplied by Mapbox. Tiles are requested by tile number through our server, so Mapbox receives neither your IP address nor your coordinates; a single tile covers an area comparable to the rounding described in section 3.

5.5 Cloudflare — DNS

The app resolves our server's name using DNS-over-HTTPS via Cloudflare's public resolver (1.1.1.1). The query is encrypted and contains only the hostname of our server.

5.6 Your own phone

If you use the companion phone app, your position travels from the phone to the watch over Google's Wearable Data Layer — a direct link between two devices you own. It does not pass through our servers or any third party.

6. What is stored on your device

In the app's private storage, readable by no other app:

• the last known position (latitude, longitude, timestamp) and last compass heading;
• the last snapshot of the sky that was drawn, so the face is not empty after a restart;
• your settings: radius, refresh interval, units, labels, hiding of ground traffic, language;
• a cache of aircraft types and operators, keyed by transponder address;
• cached map tiles, when the satellite face is used.

Android backup is switched off on purpose (allowBackup="false" together with data extraction rules). The stored position and sky snapshot would otherwise be copied to Google's cloud backup and to any new device you transfer to. Nothing here is worth restoring — there are only a handful of settings, and the position refreshes from GPS within seconds.

All of it is deleted when you uninstall the app or clear its storage.

7. Retention

8. Legal basis for processing (GDPR)

• Location data — your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, given through the Android permission prompt and withdrawable at any time in system settings.
• IP address for rate limiting and security logs — legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, namely keeping the service available and protecting it from abuse.

9. Sharing and transfers

We do not sell, rent, trade or share personal data with anyone. There is no advertising, no data broker, no profiling and no automated decision-making. Data is disclosed to third parties only in the limited, technical form described in section 5, or where we are legally obliged to do so.

Our server and the third-party services listed above may be located inside or outside the European Economic Area. Because the data reaching them contains no identifiers and no precise location, the transfer is minimal by design.

10. Children

Live Flight Tracker Radar is not directed at children and collects no data that identifies any person, regardless of age.

11. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to data portability, to withdraw consent at any time, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in Poland, the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO).

We should be honest about what these rights mean here: we hold nothing that can be linked to you, so in most cases we would be unable to identify your data even if you asked us to. The most effective control is directly in your hands — revoke the location permission, or uninstall the app, and the processing stops completely.

To exercise any right, or to ask a question about this policy, write to matituz@gmail.com.

12. Security

Connections use HTTPS exclusively. Local data lives in app-private storage and is excluded from cloud backup. The API key embedded in the app is shared by every installation, exists only to limit access to our own server, and does not identify you or your device.

13. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be published at this address with a new "last updated" date. Material changes affecting how your data is handled will be announced in the app release notes.

14. Contact

Rectu Marcin Tuzel
Jagodowa 4, Lubin, Poland
E-mail: matituz@gmail.com
Phone: +48 737 489 001

Developer of the Live Flight Tracker Radar application on Google Play.

Appendix: Google Play Data safety

For the Data safety form in Google Play Console, Live Flight Tracker Radar declares: