Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy describes how XCviewer ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses, and shares information about you when you use our web application.

2. Information We Collect

• Account Information: When you register using a third-party service like Google, we receive your name and email address.
• Flight Data: We collect the flight data you upload, such as IGC or KML files, including GPS coordinates, altitude, and timestamp data.
• Optional Usage Information: With your consent, we collect information about your device, browser, pages, feature interactions, and masked session activity to identify technical and usability problems.
• Subscription Information: For subscribers, we collect subscription status, billing period, and payment history.

3. Payment Information

When you subscribe to our paid plans, payment processing is handled by Stripe, our third-party payment processor. We do not store your complete payment card information on our servers. Stripe collects and processes your payment information according to their own privacy policy. We only receive confirmation of successful payments and basic billing information necessary to provide our service.

4. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, maintain, and improve our services.
• Personalize your experience.
• Communicate with you about your account or service changes.
• Monitor consented usage trends, conversion journeys, and technical failures.
• Produce statistics about XCviewer from all uploaded flights, public and private, and use them on our website, in our communication and marketing (for example the number of flights uploaded, kilometres flown, or the most active countries and sites).
• Develop and check our models (thermals, wind and flight analysis), using copies of your flight files kept on our own server (see below).

Our models and your flights: XCviewer estimates where thermals trigger, how strong they are and how the wind behaves, from the terrain, the sun and weather forecasts. To develop these models and check how well they match reality, we keep a copy of each uploaded flight file, public and private, on our own server, hosted by Hetzner in Germany (section 5). The copy is the original file as you uploaded it, so it contains what the file contains, such as the pilot name, glider and flight recorder details; it is stored under an internal flight number, without your account, email or username. When we train or check a model, we use only the positions, altitudes and times of the track, for example to find where pilots climbed, where they glided and how the wind drifted them, never the pilot name, glider or recorder details. This work is done by XCviewer itself; these files are never shared, sold or shown to other users. The models that result contain no track and cannot be used to rebuild one of your flights. Flights of school student accounts are never copied or used.

Your choice: you can stop your flights being used for our models at any time in Settings → Privacy (“Help improve XCviewer’s models with my flights”). New flights are then no longer copied, and the copies we already keep are deleted, usually within a day and at the latest within 30 days. When you delete a flight, its copy is deleted the same way. These copies are not included in our server backups, so nothing of them remains after deletion. Models trained before you changed your choice are not retrained, but they contain none of your tracks.

Anonymous statistics: these statistics are totals and counts only. They never include a track, a username, your name or anything else that identifies you, and we only show a figure for a country or a site when at least 3 different pilots contributed to it. Showing an actual flight (its track on a map) always requires your permission: either your account or that flight is public (section 6), or you accepted our request to feature it.

Legal Basis: We process optional product analytics and session replay based on your consent. We process service data and operational errors based on contractual necessity and our legitimate interest in operating a secure, reliable service. We compute anonymous statistics based on our legitimate interest in describing and promoting XCviewer; you can object by contacting us. We keep and use copies of flight files for our models based on our legitimate interest in giving pilots better and safer information about thermals, wind and flying conditions; you can object at any time with the setting described above or by contacting us.

5. How We Share Your Information

We do not share your personal information with third parties, except in the following cases:

• With your consent.
• For legal reasons, such as complying with applicable laws or regulations.
• With service providers who process data on our behalf, including Supabase for database/authentication, Hetzner (Germany) for our own servers, which compute weather forecasts and keep the copies of flight files described in section 4, Stripe for payments, PostHog EU Cloud for consented product analytics and masked session replay, and Sentry for application error monitoring.
• When you make your account public, as described in section 6.

When you look at a forecast, the app asks our forecast server (server.xcviewer.org, hosted by Hetzner in Germany) for the place you selected. Like any web request, this shows your IP address to our server; we do not link these requests to your account. Our forecast server keeps technical access logs (time, requested address without its parameters, status and a truncated IP address with its last part removed) for 7 days to detect outages and abuse; they are not included in backups.

Public pages load relief map tiles from Esri (ArcGIS Online) and country flags from flagcdn.com. These requests come from your browser and reveal your IP address to those providers, but no flight or account data is sent to them.

6. Public and Private Accounts

Like on a social network, your account is either public or private. Free accounts choose between a public account (unlimited storage) and a private one (up to 2 stored flights). Pro accounts are private by default and can become public. A public account is never switched on for you: you choose it yourself, after confirming that you are 18 or older. It is not available to school student accounts.

Private account: your flights are visible only to you, and to the friends you share a flight with. Nothing appears in the community or on our public pages, except a flight you decide to make public yourself, or one you allowed us to feature (see below).

Public account: the flights you upload while public appear in the community automatically. Earlier flights appear only if you add them.

One flight at a time: whatever your account setting, you can make a single flight public from its page in your logbook, after confirming that you are 18 or older. It is shown exactly like the flights of a public account and stays public until you hide it or delete it, even if you later switch your account to private.

A public username is required to publish flights. It is shown next to your flights; it can be your real name or a nickname, as you prefer.

Featuring a flight without your name: we may ask you, through a notification in the app, whether we can feature one of your flights that is not public, for example among the latest flights on our home page. Nothing is shown unless you accept. A featured flight shows the track, the takeoff place and country, the date and the statistics listed below, never your username, and other pilots cannot replay it in 3D. You can hide it at any time from its page in your logbook. If you decline, we do not ask again about that flight.

What signed-in pilots can see for each public flight, in the app and on the flight's own page:

• Your public username.
• The track drawn on a relief map, precise enough to place it to within about 100 m.
• The name of the takeoff place (from reverse geocoding, never the free-text site you typed) and the country.
• The flight date, distance, duration, maximum altitude and altitude gain.
• A 3D replay of the flight (position, altitude and time only), built on our servers from your file.

What visitors who are not signed in can see: the same flight cards and statistics, without your username and without the 3D replay. We also use public flights, without your username, on our public pages (for example the latest flights on our home page) and for statistics about XCviewer.

What is never shown: your account name, email, profile, photo, glider, notes, comments and photos, unless you pick your real name as username. Your original flight file is never given to other people: they only receive the cleaned replay, without any pilot, glider or device information. By default the whole track is shown, landing included; you can hide the last 500 m before landing in Settings → Flight visibility.

Because a public flight shows where and when it happened, someone who knows that you flew there that day could still recognize it. Please keep this in mind before making your account public.

When it appears: flights uploaded while your account is public go public 24 hours after upload; an earlier flight you add appears right away. Flight pages are excluded from search engine indexing.

Legal basis and withdrawal: we publish and feature flights based on your consent. You can withdraw it at any time. Switching to a private account in Settings → Flight visibility removes the flights published automatically from the community and our public pages right away. A flight you made public yourself or allowed us to feature can be hidden at any time from its page in your logbook, and Pro accounts can hide any of their flights there. Deleting a flight also removes it. After switching to private, you can go public again after 30 days. We keep a record of your choices (date, choice and the version of the text you agreed to) as proof of consent. Statistics we already computed only contain totals that do not identify you.

Moderation: we may hide a public flight that looks wrong or is reported, and remove a username that is offensive or impersonates someone. You can report a flight from its page or by email.

Activity figures: our home page may show how many flights were uploaded, overall or in each country, computed from all flights, private ones included, as described in section 4. These are counts only, without any track, and a country is shown only when at least 3 different pilots flew there.

7. Data Security and Retention

We take reasonable measures to protect your information using industry-standard security practices (HTTPS, secure database connections). Account and flight data is retained while your account is active or as needed to provide the service. Copies of flight files kept for our models (section 4) are deleted when you delete the flight or opt out, and are not included in backups. Analytics and diagnostic data is retained only for the period configured with our processors and is periodically deleted.

8. Your Rights

You have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal data. You can manage your flight data through your account dashboard and withdraw optional analytics consent at any time in Settings → Privacy & Analytics.

EU Users (GDPR): You also have the right to data portability, restriction of processing, and to object to processing.

9. Cookies

Essential browser storage maintains your session and preferences. PostHog analytics and masked session replay are disabled until you opt in. Your choice is stored on your device and can be changed at any time. Session replay masks page text, input values, and element attributes; we do not intentionally send flight files, GPS coordinates, flight names, email addresses, form contents, or payment details to analytics.

10. Contact Information

For privacy-related questions or to exercise your data rights, please contact us at info@xcviewer.org.