Orbital Traffic is a satellite and near-Earth-object tracker. This page explains what data the app uses, what it doesn't, and where anything that does get sent leaves your device.
The app asks for your device location only when you tap What's Overhead, and only at that moment. Your coordinates are used entirely on your own device, to work out which tracked objects are above your local horizon — the calculation runs in the app itself, not on a server. Your location is never transmitted to us or to anyone else, and is not saved: it is discarded as soon as the list is produced, and nothing about where you are is kept between uses.
If you decline the permission, the app remembers only that you declined — not any location — so it doesn't prompt you repeatedly. You can clear that in Settings → Privacy & Permissions.
If you save an object to your favourites or your watchlist, those lists are stored only on your own device, in this app's local storage. They are never transmitted anywhere — not to us, not to anyone else — and there is no account or sync behind them, so they exist nowhere but on your device. Clearing the app's data, or deleting the app, removes them.
These are services the app fetches public orbital/space data from. None of them receive any information that identifies you, with one exception: if the app's backend is ever temporarily unreachable, the app falls back to fetching data directly from CelesTrak from your own device, in which case CelesTrak sees your device's IP address for that request. This fallback is rare — in normal operation, every such request is proxied through the app's backend and CelesTrak never sees your device directly.
The app's backend runs on Cloudflare, which, like any web infrastructure provider, processes standard connection metadata (such as IP address) as a normal part of serving requests. Orbital Traffic's own code does not read, log, or use this information — though Cloudflare's platform-level request logging, enabled for operational debugging, does make this connection metadata visible to the app's operator via the Cloudflare dashboard, separately from anything the app itself does.
Orbital positions are computed on your own device from cached and periodically refreshed public orbital element data. This data is accurate as of each refresh, and is provided for informational purposes only, not for navigation or operational use.
If what the app collects changes, this page will be updated and the "last updated" date above will change accordingly.
Orbital Traffic™ is a trademark of Ian Lewis.
Questions about this policy: orbitaltraffic@outlook.com