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This site has no accounts, and I don't sell anyone's data or share it for advertising. Here is what leaves your device while you use the site, and where it goes.

The site is hosted by Vercel. As with any website, each request brings Vercel your IP address, your browser's details and the address of the page. Vercel uses them to serve the site, partly from servers in the United States; how long it keeps them is up to Vercel, under its own privacy policy. When you download a trip pack, your answers travel in the address of that request. The PDF is made on the spot and the site doesn't store it, though Vercel's cache may keep a copy for up to an hour.

To see which pages are read and how quickly they load, I use Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights. They record the page address, the site you came from (on your first page only) and your type of device and connection; like any request, these measurements reach Vercel with your IP address and browser details. They set no cookies, and what I see are totals, not individual visitors.

Your location is asked for only when you press a location button (“Use my location”, “My location” and the like). In the welcome on the cover, the Night Planner's “Tonight, where you are”, Hunt Mode and the Aurora Simulator, your position is rounded while it is still on your device: only your area, to about 10 km, goes to the site's server, never your exact position. The server then asks Open-Meteo for that area's cloud forecast. The welcome's place search takes the same route: it sends only what you type, and the page's language. Open-Meteo never sees your IP address. The world map on the Forecast page, the Darkness & Moon Calendar and the Night Planner's “Drive now” use your position only on your device; to rank the nearest spots, “Drive now” asks the server for nothing but those spots' forecasts.

If you press “Alert me” or turn on storm alerts, your browser first asks whether you allow the site to send you notifications. So that alerts can reach you, the site's server keeps an alert record. It holds your browser's push address and keys, the places you watch (their names and countries, the Kp each one needs, and coordinates rounded to an area of about 10 km), your language, whether storm alerts are on, the magnetometer stations whose substorm bell you have rung, and the date the record was created; it holds no name, email address or IP address of yours. To decide whether to alert you, the server asks Open-Meteo each day for those areas' cloud forecast. The record is kept in a database service (Upstash Redis) until you turn the alerts off, and it's deleted as soon as it turns out an alert can no longer reach that browser. Small markers that stop the same alert going out twice delete themselves within three days.

Alerts reach you through your browser's own push service: Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft, depending on the browser. To prevent abuse, when you turn alerts on or off the server keeps a one-way hash of your IP address (not the address itself) for one hour. Requests for cloud forecasts, place search, the live-data check, the sightings board, the embeddable badge and the PDF and card downloads are also counted by the same kind of hash, in the server's memory.

Some pictures load straight from other services, without a click: Bluesky photos on the Live Sightings page, stock agencies' thumbnails on the Shop page, and the stills of YouTube videos. Your browser fetches these itself, like any image, so those services see your IP address and browser details, but the site doesn't send them the address of the page you're on. That page and the cover's “Spotted this week” strip (which shows no pictures) list public Bluesky posts; to keep off-topic posts out, an automated check (Anthropic's Claude) looks at those posts' public images. There's no way to upload photos to the site.

Links to other sites (maps, booking partners, social media) carry only what's written in the link, for example a place's coordinates or your trip dates, and only when you click them. From there on, that site's own policy applies.

The contact form sends nothing to this site: it opens a ready-made email in your own mail app, and you decide whether to send it. My mailbox (yigit@chasing.pink) is hosted by Zoho Mail (EU). I use what you write for nothing but replying to you, and keep it no longer than our correspondence needs.

The site has a single cookie of its own: ybp-lang. It's set only when you choose a language yourself (with the TR/EN switch or a language link), holds nothing but “tr” or “en”, and lasts a year, so the home page opens in the language you chose. The site has no advertising or tracking cookies of its own, and its visit counting uses no cookies.

What the site remembers stays in your browser's own storage: the text size, whether you read the book as printed or in its current edition, your saved place, the alerts you've turned on, the spot and red-light level you set in Hunt Mode, the camera and lens you picked, your checklist ticks, and small notes so the site doesn't repeat itself (the welcome, the opening animation, a storm bulletin you've seen, what's new since your last visit, whether the offline copies were refreshed today). When the site gives you tonight's answer for your saved place, it asks the server for that place's cloud forecast (as an area of about 10 km if the place came from your location); the server keeps the place only if you turn on an alert for it.

So that the site also works offline, a service worker keeps copies of the pages you've visited, a few of the site's main pages, their photos and the latest forecast data in your browser (Cache Storage). These copies stay on your device. Deleting this site's data in your browser's settings clears them, along with everything above.

Videos play only when you press play. Until then, only the video's still image loads, from YouTube's image server (i.ytimg.com), which sets no cookies. Pressing play loads YouTube's privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie.com); from then on, YouTube's own privacy policy applies, and its player may store data in your browser.

Data controller: Yiğit Yüksel. Under Turkish Law No. 6698 (KVKK) and the GDPR, you have the right to access your personal data, request its correction or deletion, object to its processing and request its portability.

To exercise these rights or request the deletion of your data, simply write to yigit@chasing.pink; your request will be resolved within a reasonable time.

Your alert record holds nothing that tells me who you are, so I can't find it from an email; turning off all your alerts, in the browser where you turned them on, deletes it from the server.

This site is published by Yiğit Yüksel as a personal project. All photographs, texts and design on the site are © Yiğit Yüksel and may not be used, reproduced or distributed without permission.

The content is for information purposes; for space-weather and travel information, rely on official sources (NOAA SWPC, local meteorology and road-condition services). The site is not responsible for the content of third-party links.