Privacy policy

Who we are

Lumavik is published by Vast Flow, LLP, which operates the app and this website and is the data controller for the limited processing described below. You can reach us at [email protected] for any question about this policy, including a request to access or delete data.

The short version

The app has no user accounts and no login. It does not ask for your name, your email address or your date of birth, and there is nowhere for it to put them. Your saved locations, your settings and your history live on your device. Two things do leave it: a coarse coordinate if you enable alerts, so a notification can be decided while your phone is asleep, and a rounded coordinate whenever the app looks up cloud cover. Both are described precisely below, along with the campaign attribution we receive when somebody installs the app after seeing an advertisement. If you delete the app, everything stored on the device goes with it.

The website stores nothing you type. The free tools run entirely in your browser: the coordinates you enter into the geomagnetic latitude calculator or the tonight verdict are never transmitted to us, because the arithmetic happens on your machine.

What the app stores on your device

Saved locations, alert thresholds, display preferences and a cache of recent NOAA forecast data are stored in the app's own local storage. This information is not synced to a server of ours and is not backed up by us. It may be included in your own device backups if you have those enabled, in which case it is governed by Apple's terms rather than ours.

Location

The app asks for location access so it can score conditions where you are. You can refuse and enter coordinates or pick a place manually; the app works either way. The precise coordinate never leaves the device: everything the app computes about darkness, geomagnetic latitude and the aurora itself is arithmetic done on your phone against public data. Two narrower things do travel, and both are rounded first — the alert relay below, and the cloud lookup after it.

Alerts are the exception, because a push notification has to be decided somewhere the device is not. When you enable an alert for a location, the app sends that location to our alert relay after rounding it to half a degree. Half a degree is coarse on purpose: it is enough to compute geomagnetic latitude and darkness correctly and it is far too coarse to identify a home. We do not receive or store the place name you gave it, so what the relay holds is a rounded coordinate, a push token and your alert settings — nothing that names you. Notification text is written generically for the same reason.

Cloud cover is the second reason a coordinate leaves the device, and it applies whether or not you use alerts. To tell you whether the sky above you will actually be clear, the app asks the Norwegian Meteorological Institute — MET Norway — for a forecast at the location being displayed, rounded to two decimal places, which is about a kilometre. That request identifies the app rather than you: MET requires callers to send a contact string, so it carries our domain and our support address, never anything of yours. As with any request to any server, MET sees the IP address it arrived from. We send nothing else and we receive a weather forecast back. MET has no account for you, no identifier that persists between requests, and no way to tell one Lumavik user from another.

The one place the app asks about somewhere you are not is Pro's search for clearer sky nearby. When you press that button it checks six points around you, at sixty and a hundred and twenty kilometres, biased toward the pole because that is where the aurora is. It runs only on that button press, never in the background, and the results are held for an hour and never saved.

Push notifications

If you enable alerts, Apple issues a push token that identifies your app installation to the notification service. We store that token with the rounded coordinates and the settings for that alert — the threshold, and the hours you would rather not be woken. There is no name in the record, not yours and not the one you gave the place. Turning alerts off in the app, or deleting the app, causes the record to be removed; tokens that Apple reports as invalid are deleted automatically. We do not use push notifications for marketing.

Where the forecast data comes from

Forecast data comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. In most cases the app requests it directly from NOAA, which means NOAA's servers receive a request from your device's IP address in the ordinary way that any internet request works. We do not send NOAA anything about you, and NOAA does not know which of their users are Lumavik users. Their data is published in the public domain. Cloud cover comes from MET Norway under a CC BY 4.0 licence, requested as described under Location above.

Purchases

Subscriptions are sold and processed by Apple. We never see your payment details. To know whether to unlock Pro features, the app uses RevenueCat, which processes an anonymous identifier and the receipt Apple issues. That tells us that a subscription exists and what state it is in. It does not tell us who you are, and we cannot link a subscription to a person: the app never calls RevenueCat's login, so the subscriber record is anonymous by construction. RevenueCat also records the device identifiers described under install attribution below.

Advertising inside the app

There is none. An earlier version of this page described a banner on the home screen of the free tier, served by Google Mobile Ads. That was the plan; it was dropped before the app shipped and the code went with it. The app today contains no advertising SDK, shows no advertisement and makes no request to any ad network, on either tier. We are leaving this paragraph here rather than deleting the heading, because a policy that quietly loses a section is harder to trust than one that says what changed.

Install attribution

We sometimes pay to advertise the app, including in App Store search results, and we want to know which campaign an install came from. That is a different question from what you do afterwards, and the three mechanisms below answer only the first one.

RevenueCat records the vendor identifier Apple assigns to this app on this device, the IP address the request came from, and the advertising identifier where one is available. Because the app never shows Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt, the advertising identifier is handed to us as a string of zeros — so what actually arrives is an identifier that is specific to us, resets when you delete the app, and cannot be matched against any other company's records. Apple's Search Ads framework supplies a one-time token that names the campaign an install is credited to. Apple's SKAdNetwork reports, on a deliberate delay, how far installs from a campaign travelled: opened the app, finished onboarding, used the forecast, reached the paywall, subscribed. Apple designed SKAdNetwork so that what reaches us is a campaign total rather than a person, and Apple decides what is released, not us.

This is attribution, not analytics. It can answer whether a campaign was worth the money. It cannot answer what you tapped, which places you saved, which nights you checked, or whether you went outside — and none of those ever leaves your phone.

Analytics

The app contains no analytics SDK. There is no Firebase Analytics, no Crashlytics and no event tracking of what you tap: no record of the screens you open, the locations you keep or the alerts you act on. The install attribution described above is the whole of what the app reports, and it measures campaigns rather than people. This is a deliberate choice and it costs us the ability to answer questions about how the app is used; we consider that a reasonable trade in a category where a location history would be sensitive.

This website is different, and you should know that. It loads Microsoft Clarity, which records aggregate usage of the site — pages viewed, approximate region, device and browser, and anonymised interaction patterns such as scroll depth. We use it to find pages that are broken or confusing. It is not linked to any app data, and it does not follow you to other sites. Clarity sets cookies in your browser and honours the Global Privacy Control signal where your browser sends one. If you would rather not be included, a content blocker or your browser's tracking protection will stop it, and the site works normally without it.

What we never collect

We do not collect your name, email address, contacts, photos, calendar, health data or a location history, and we never receive a usable advertising identifier, because the app does not ask for permission to track you and Apple returns zeros to apps that do not. We do not sell data, and we do not share it with data brokers. There is no mechanism in the app by which we could build a profile of an individual, because there is no account to attach one to.

Legal bases, for readers in the EEA and UK

Processing the rounded coordinate and push token for alerts is done on the basis of your consent, given when you enable alerts, and you can withdraw it at any time by turning alerts off. Processing purchase receipts is necessary to perform the contract you entered into when you subscribed. Requesting a cloud forecast is necessary to deliver the feature you opened the app for. Install attribution and website analytics rest on our legitimate interest in knowing whether our advertising works and in improving a free product, balanced against the fact that neither identifies you.

Retention

Alert records persist for as long as the alert is enabled. They are deleted when you disable alerts, when you delete the app, or automatically once Apple reports the push token as no longer valid. Purchase records, and the attribution fields attached to them, are retained for as long as Apple's receipt validation requires. SKAdNetwork reaches us only as campaign totals, which contain no individual record to keep or delete. Website analytics are retained according to Microsoft Clarity's own retention schedule.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, delete or port your personal data, and to object to certain processing. Because we hold so little, most of these are satisfied by turning alerts off or deleting the app. If you want us to confirm what a rounded coordinate and token record contains, or to delete one, write to [email protected] from any address and tell us the approximate coordinates and when you enabled the alert, and we will find and remove the record. We will respond within thirty days.

Children

Lumavik is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has enabled alerts and you would like the record removed, contact us and we will delete it.

International transfers

Our alert relay runs on servers in Germany, and cloud forecasts are requested from MET Norway in Norway. Apple, RevenueCat and Microsoft process data in the regions described in their own policies, which include the United States. Where personal data is transferred out of the EEA or the UK, it is done under the transfer mechanisms those providers publish.

Changes to this policy

If we change how data is handled we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes that affect data already collected will also be announced in the app. We will not retroactively broaden the use of data collected under an earlier version of this policy.

Cookies and similar technologies

The app uses no cookies; it is not a browser. On this website, the only cookies set are those used by Microsoft Clarity for the aggregate analytics described above. There is no advertising cookie on the website, no remarketing pixel, no social login and no embedded third-party widget that could set one. The free tools store nothing in your browser beyond what is needed to render the page you are on, so closing the tab discards everything you typed.

We honour the Global Privacy Control signal where your browser sends one, and a content blocker or your browser's built-in tracking protection will prevent the analytics script from loading at all. Everything on this site works normally without it, including every calculator.

If you are in California

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in the California Consumer Privacy Act. The app carries no advertising at all, so there is no advertising partner to share anything with, and the campaign attribution described above is measurement of our own spending rather than a sale of your data. You have the right to know what we hold, to request deletion, and not to be discriminated against for exercising either — and because there is no account, exercising them rarely requires more than deleting the app. Requests go to the address below.

Security

The alert relay accepts only what it needs — a rounded coordinate, a push token and a threshold — over an encrypted connection, and it holds no field that could identify a person on its own. There is no password to steal because there is no account, and there is no email address on file to leak. This is the main practical benefit of building without accounts, and it is a deliberate design decision rather than an oversight: a database that does not exist cannot be breached.

Contact

Questions, deletion requests and complaints all go to [email protected]. If you are in the EEA or the UK and you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.