Privacy

Who

Lotse is operated by Ferdinand von Hagen. Questions and requests about your data: [email protected].

Lotse has no advertising, no analytics and no tracking. Nothing is sold or passed on for marketing.

Your account

You sign in with an e-mail code, with Google or with Apple. The server keeps your e-mail address, your name when Google or Apple provides it, a user id, the sign-in provider, and your sessions (refresh tokens, stored as a hash). Login codes by e-mail are sent through Postmark. When you sign in a second device by QR code, that device's name and platform are kept for ten minutes.

What the app stores for you

So that your devices show the same data, the server keeps your tasks (with the original task files you imported), your waypoint collections with their photos, your gliders, your FLY layouts, the names you give to aircraft in the traffic layer and the settings you sync. Task and waypoint coordinates are part of that data. A layout you share by link is public under that link until you delete it.

Recorded flights (IGC files) stay on your device. They reach the server only when you attach one to a report (below).

Feedback and reports

When you send feedback, the server receives your text and what you chose to attach: a screenshot, device information (app version, platform, operating system, device model, screen size, the names of connected instruments), the app log, and for a flight report the IGC file and the last five minutes of instrument data, which contain your positions.

Each report becomes an issue in a private GitHub repository of the operator. The issue names you by user id only, not by e-mail. Attached files are reachable through a link in the issue for 90 days.

Crash reports (the error, the stack trace and the device information above, never positions) are sent only when you switch them on.

SkySight

If you connect a SkySight account, your SkySight user name and password are stored on the server encrypted (AES-256-GCM) so that the server can sign in to SkySight for you. They are never shown, logged or sent anywhere else, and they are removed when you disconnect or delete your account.

Positions

The app uses your location on the device to show your position, to compute the flight and to record it. The server receives positions only as part of what is described above: the centre of a places search, points for an elevation lookup, task and waypoint coordinates, and the files of a report. Your position is not published; the live traffic layer shows aircraft reported by the Open Glider Network, not your phone.

Where the data is

The server and the object storage run at Hetzner (EU). Cloudflare sits in front of the server, caches public map data and sees the IP address of every request. The server log keeps the IP address of failed or slow requests for operations. Feedback goes to GitHub, login e-mails through Postmark, and sign-in with Google or Apple goes through those providers under their own terms.

Deleting your data

In the app: Home › Account › Delete account. That removes the account, its sessions and connections, every synced document and file that no other user owns, and your reports and their files. GitHub issues already created stay, with your user id only. The same e-mail address can sign up again as a new, empty account.

Without the app: request the deletion by e-mail.