Privacy & License

The short version

The sections below are the operative terms. Where the summary and the detail disagree, the detail wins.

What we collect

If you just visit the site

We use Umami, a self-hosted analytics package, to measure visits and page views in our own database. A small script served from our own domain sends the page, referrer, screen size, language, browser, operating system, device type, and campaign parameters; the country, region, and city come from Cloudflare. Umami groups anonymous visits with a hash of your IP address and user agent whose salt changes at the start of every calendar month, so it can tell that a visitor returned within the same month but cannot recognise you from one month to the next. It does not store your IP address, set cookies, or write anything to your browser's storage.

When you are signed in, the page also gives Umami a pseudonymous identifier: a keyed hash of your account number that only we can link back to your account. Umami never receives your username or email address. This lets us understand how signed-in features are used.

While we move to Umami, we are still running Ahoy, our previous self-hosted analytics package, so the two can be compared before Ahoy is removed. Ahoy records page views in our own database with a masked IP address and may associate a signed-in visit with your account. We do not enable either tool's own geocoding or send analytics data to a third party.

This analytics data is used only to understand and improve adsb.win. It is not used for advertising, sold, or shared with data brokers. There are no advertising pixels or browser fingerprints, and no third-party embeds beyond the map tiles described below.

Our sites sit behind Cloudflare, which terminates TLS, filters attacks, and keeps its own transient request logs as our infrastructure provider. Cloudflare passes an approximate location (latitude, longitude, and city derived from your IP address) along with each request. The homepage reads those coordinates to decide which patch of sky to show you and then discards them. Cloudflare's country, region, and city are retained with analytics visits; latitude and longitude are not written to our analytics database.

Our origin web server keeps short-lived operational logs (IP address, request path, response code) for abuse prevention, rate limiting, and debugging. They are not used to build profiles.

If you create an account

• Your email address and a hashed password. We store no legal name, no address, and no marketing profile.
• A username. This one is public: it is what appears on leaderboards, badges, and anywhere else your play is visible. Pick a handle rather than your real name if you would rather not be identifiable, and ask us if you want to change it.
• Session records. Each signed-in session stores the IP address and browser user-agent it was created from, so you can recognize a session that isn't yours.
• Email we send you. Currently password resets only. We do not run a marketing list.

If paid tiers arrive, an account that buys one will also carry billing details: what you bought, when it renews, and the receipts. Card numbers are not among them; payments would run through an established payment processor that handles the card data itself, so we never see or store it. Nothing on this page is a subscription today, and we will describe exactly what changes before that becomes true.

If you run a feeder

A feeder is identified by a UUID you generate and a receiver identifier assigned by our aggregation server. Against that identity we keep:

• the display name you choose, when you claim the feeder to an account;
• first-seen and last-seen timestamps, and the connection statistics your receiver reports (message rate, position rate, bandwidth, and round-trip latency);
• daily per-aircraft sighting counts, which is what the game, your statistics, and the leaderboards are built from;
• your receiver's precise coordinates and antenna altitude, which multilateration and coverage quality cannot work without.
• when MLAT coordinates are unavailable, a coarse location estimated locally from the connection IP for private network operations; we retain a keyed digest rather than the raw source IP with that estimate.

We keep that precise position private. If we display an individual receiver on an MLAT connection map, we use a separately stored public point rounded and randomly displaced by roughly 1–3 km; it is never the coordinate your receiver supplied. The list of connected feeders is deliberately not exposed on our public API. A visitor using the same public IP address as an active feeder can see its live, read-only statistics; if several feeders share that IP, they appear only as anonymous numbered choices with connection activity. If you show up on a coverage map it is as anonymous, aggregated coverage rather than a pin on your house.

Administrators can view a private operations map containing exact MLAT locations and coarse IP-derived estimates for troubleshooting network coverage. IP estimates are visibly distinguished, never exposed through the public API, and are replaced when the connection IP changes. The local city-level lookup data is supplied by DB-IP under CC BY 4.0; feeder IP addresses are not sent to DB-IP or another lookup service.

Aircraft data

ADS-B is an unencrypted broadcast. Every equipped aircraft continuously transmits its identity, position, altitude, and velocity to anyone with a receiver, by design and by regulation. adsb.win aggregates those broadcasts from volunteer receivers, combines them with multilateration results, and publishes what it sees.

Aircraft records, including ICAO hex code, callsign, registration, type, and track history, are data about aircraft, not about people. We do not attempt to identify owners, passengers, or crew, and we do not combine flight tracks with personal information.

We do not filter aircraft

adsb.win shows every aircraft its feeders hear. We do not operate a block list, we do not honor commercial filtering programs, and we do not remove aircraft from the map or the history on request. A network that quietly hides part of the sky is not the network we are building, and feeders contribute on the understanding that their data will not be selectively suppressed.

Filters you apply to your own screen are a different thing entirely, and we are happy to build those: showing only the traffic you care about changes your view, not the data anyone else can see. What we will not do is remove aircraft from the network at the request of an owner, an operator, or a subscriber.

If you believe a record contains genuinely inaccurate data, or personal information that has ended up somewhere it shouldn't, write to us and we will look at it on the merits.

Cookies & storage

• A signed session cookie, set only when you sign in and removed when you sign out. Without it we cannot keep you logged in.
• A short-lived encrypted feeder-selection cookie, set when several active feeders share your public IP and you choose one. It expires after an hour and permits read-only statistics only while your IP still matches.
• A light/dark theme preference kept in your browser's local storage. It never leaves your device.
• Cloudflare's security cookies, set by our infrastructure provider to distinguish humans from attack traffic.

That is the complete list. Our analytics is cookieless, and there are no advertising or retargeting cookies.

How long we keep things

• Aircraft observations and flight history: indefinitely. The archive is the point of the project. It is not backfillable, so it is never trimmed on a schedule.
• Feeder statistics and sighting aggregates: indefinitely, so that long-term records, streaks, and coverage history stay meaningful.
• Account details: until you ask us to delete the account.
• Sessions: until you sign out or the session is revoked.
• Analytics visits and page views: retained until they are periodically pruned or you ask us to delete analytics associated with your account.
• Operational web logs: only as long as they are useful for abuse prevention and debugging.

Deleting an account removes your email address, password hash, and sessions. It does not erase the aircraft observations your receiver contributed, which are already aggregated into a shared public network record; see the feeder grant below.

Retention and access are different things. Keeping the archive does not guarantee that every historical time range will remain available through every public view, account, feeder benefit, API, or service tier. The live map is the exception: current aircraft remain free and unfiltered for everyone.

Who else touches the data

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising. Personal data reaches third parties only where a service we run requires it:

• Cloudflare: CDN, TLS termination, and DDoS protection in front of every site.
• Our hosting provider: servers located in Canada, where the application and archive run.
• Email delivery: transactional mail such as password resets.
• Map tiles: served by OpenStreetMap and CARTO, which necessarily see your IP address when your browser fetches a tile.
• Optional terrain tiles: when Terrain is enabled in a tilted live map, your browser requests elevation tiles directly from Mapterhorn. The provider sees your IP address and which map tiles you request.

A payment processor may join that list if paid tiers arrive. It would be named here before it went live and would not receive anything beyond what its job requires.

Multilateration requires sharing timing observations between the receivers that heard the same aircraft. That exchange carries signal timing, not anything about you.

If you are in the EU, UK, or another jurisdiction with data-transfer rules: using adsb.win means your data is processed on servers outside your country. We will disclose data to law enforcement only where we are legally compelled, and we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or stop processing it. If the GDPR, UK GDPR, or a US state privacy law applies to you, those are your statutory rights and we honor them as such; if none of them applies to you, we will do the same thing anyway.

There is not yet a self-service delete button in the app. Email [email protected] from the address on the account and we will action the request, normally within 30 days. You may also complain to your local data protection authority.

Our lawful bases, in GDPR terms: contract for running your account and feeder; legitimate interests for security, abuse prevention, understanding and improving adsb.win through the analytics described above, and operating an aggregated aircraft tracking network in the public interest; consent for anything we ask you to opt into.

Aircraft observations are not personal data about you and are outside the scope of a deletion request; see retention above.

Children

Accounts are not intended for children under 13 (or under 16 where local law sets that threshold), and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. Anyone of any age can watch the map, because that requires no account and collects nothing. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

Data license

adsb.win's aggregated aircraft dataset, including live positions, the historical archive, and everything derived from them, is our property and the community's shared work. It is not published under an open-data license. We deliberately have not adopted ODbL or a Creative Commons license, because share-alike terms would force the archive's future into a shape we cannot commit to on the community's behalf.

What you get instead is a standing, revocable permission, free of charge:

Conditions on the free grant: attribute adsb.win visibly wherever the data appears, stay inside the published rate limits below, don't imply we endorse you, and don't strip provenance from what you redistribute. We can withdraw the grant from a specific user who abuses the service; we are not going to withdraw it from the public.

Public API limits

The free API runs on the same origin that serves the live map to everyone else, so the limits are there to keep the network up rather than to push you toward a paid tier. One badly written scraper can measurably slow the map down for every viewer in the region, and the rate limiter is what stops that from being anyone's problem but the scraper's.

Current limits, per IP address:

• 20 requests per second sustained, with short bursts up to 40 absorbed rather than rejected.
• 16 concurrent connections.
• A few low-traffic endpoints, such as the aggregate feeder summary, allow smaller bursts.
• Over the limit you get HTTP 429. Back off and retry; nothing is banned for tripping it occasionally.

Two things make a client a good citizen well inside those numbers: request only the bounding box you actually display, and poll no faster than once a second. The live data is refreshed on roughly that cadence, so faster polling returns the same answer twice and costs both of us. Splitting one workload across many IPs to get around the limits is evasion rather than engineering, and it is the one thing that will get an address blocked.

Need more? Ask. Raised limits are available on request, and for research, community, and open-source projects they are free. We would rather know who you are and what you are building than have you discover the limiter the hard way. Write to [email protected] with what you're building, the request rate and coverage you need, and how long you need it for. Commercial volume, uptime commitments, and support are the paid tier described further down; everything else is usually just a conversation.

These numbers can change as the network grows. This page carries the current ones, and a change that tightens them will be announced before it takes effect.

Not all of our data carries the same rights

Some aircraft data on this site reaches us from a third-party data partner under a display-only license. It may appear on the live map and in history pages, but we are not permitted to license it onward for redistribution through downloads, exports, or bulk feeds. Neither are you. Every stored observation carries its provenance, and anything derived from several sources inherits the most restrictive terms of its inputs. The table below states the permissions attached to each source, which is what governs your use of it:

Older parts of the archive predate per-source tracking and are treated as mixed, which is why they are display-only regardless of who originally heard them.

One caveat, stated because we would rather be accurate than flattering: our live aircraft API currently serves a single merged stream, so partner-sourced positions are not yet separated out of it. Work to split the partner feed onto its own restricted endpoint is underway. Until it lands, the display-only terms above still govern what you may do with anything you take from the API. The absence of a technical barrier is not a grant of rights.

Licensing questions and commercial requests: [email protected].

If you feed us

Feeding is voluntary, and this is the deal, stated plainly rather than buried.

What the grant does not cover

It reaches the aircraft data only. To be explicit about the word "commercially," it does not give us:

• any right to sell, rent, or license you. Your identity, email address, account, or contact details are not part of any data product and are covered by the privacy terms above, not by this grant;
• any right to publish your receiver's exact location, or to sell a per-feeder location dataset;
• any claim over the data you keep for yourself or send to other networks;
• any ownership of your equipment, your setup, or anything else you make.

So: your observations, blended into the aggregate, may end up inside something we sell. Personal data about the person who runs the receiver never does. Those are two different things, and this page keeps them apart deliberately.

The grant has to be perpetual and irrevocable for a practical reason. Contributions are merged into a single aggregated archive the moment they arrive; once your observations are blended with those of every other receiver that heard the same aircraft, they cannot be unpicked. A revocable grant would mean the archive could be dismantled retroactively, and nothing could be built on it.

You can stop feeding at any time, and you can ask us to delete your account and unclaim your feeder. Data already contributed stays in the archive.

What we promise in return

• The live map stays free and unfiltered. No account, subscription, or feeder is required. Access to historical time ranges may vary by account, feeder status, product, or service tier.
• We do not remove or hide aircraft from the network, for anyone, at any price. Filters a viewer applies to their own screen are a different thing.
• Your receiver's exact location is never published. If you enable public leaderboard participation, we may show your public username, feeder name when needed, approximate area, and aggregated feeder statistics. You can disable participation from your feederboard profile.
• Feeders keep access to their own data. Statistics and the game are live today; exports of your own sightings and deeper personal history are planned, and like the rest of the feeder perks they may evolve as the game develops.
• If a commercial data product is built on this archive, feeders will be told what it is before it ships.

You are responsible for the legality of operating a receiver where you live, and you confirm you have the right to contribute the data you send us.

Commercial offerings

We would rather say this out loud than have you discover it later. adsb.win intends to charge for some things. Running an aggregation network costs real money, and we would rather fund it by selling capability to the people and businesses who want it than by putting a paywall or an advertising network in front of everyone else.

For businesses

• Commercial licenses to live and historical flight data.
• Higher-volume API tiers with rate limits and support commitments in writing.
• Analytics and derived products built on the archive.

For people who just like planes

A paid personal tier is likely, adding depth and convenience while leaving the free, unfiltered live map intact. The kinds of things it would carry:

• Custom views and filters: watch only military traffic, a single airline, unusual types, or whatever you care about. This is a viewing preference for you, not a change to what the network shows anyone else.
• Alerts and notifications when a specific aircraft, registration, or category shows up near you.
• Mobile app features.
• Deeper personal history, larger exports of your own sightings, and richer feeder analytics.
• Extra game content: challenges, cosmetics, and other things that are fun rather than load-bearing.

None of this exists yet, and the list will change as the game develops. What matters is the shape: paid tiers add convenience, history, and depth for the person paying. They do not alter or filter the free live map, and they are never a condition of seeing the sky as it happens.

What none of it will ever mean

• A paywall on the live map.
• Selling personal data about users or feeder operators. Commercial products are built from aircraft data.
• Delaying or degrading the free service to make a paid tier look better.
• Paid removal of aircraft from public view. A subscriber can filter their own screen; nobody can filter yours.

Interested in a commercial license? [email protected].

Third-party software & assets

adsb.win is built on free software, and honoring those licenses is a condition of using it, not a courtesy. Listed here are the works whose terms reach you: what your browser downloads from us, and the network services you or your receiver talk to directly.

The copyleft obligations above attach to those works. We provide their editable SVG source, preserve or add the required authorship and modification notices, and make the complete licence texts available from the links above. Full provenance for the artwork travels with the assets themselves. If you believe we have an attribution wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Country and state or province boundaries come from Natural Earth, which is public domain. City names come from GeoNames and are used under CC BY 4.0.

The rest of the stack (the web framework, job runner, databases, and web server behind the scenes) is also open source, and we are grateful for it. None of it is distributed to you, so none of it carries a notice requirement, and we do not publish a component-and-version inventory of our own servers. If you are asking for a specific reason, write to us.

Changes to this page

We will update this page as the service grows, including commercial products, an export API, and new game features are all coming. The date at the top always reflects the current version. For a change that materially reduces your rights or widens what we do with feeder data, we will give notice on the site and by email to account holders before it takes effect, rather than editing quietly.

Continuing to use the service, or to feed it, after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

Contact

Written in plain language rather than legalese. It describes what adsb.win actually does, but it is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your own.