Privacy Policy

Who this is about

Stellamap is a free website at stellamap.net that shows a live map of the solar system. It is run by an individual operator, and the address at the bottom of this page reaches them directly.

This policy covers the website and the account you can create on it. It does not cover other sites we link to, including the space agency pages our news items point at, which have their own policies.

What is kept

If you never create an account, we hold no personal information about you. Your browser may store a small local preference recording whether the account prompt has been dismissed; it never leaves your device.

If you do create one:

• Your email address. If you sign in with Google, this is the address on your Google account, along with the basic profile information Google sends us with it.
• Your password, if you chose one. It is hashed by our authentication provider before it is stored and we never see or hold the password itself.
• A display name, which starts as the part of your email address before the @ and is whatever you change it to.
• Sign-in records kept by our authentication provider, which include your IP address, the time you signed in, and your browser. These exist so that break-in attempts can be spotted.
• Ordinary server logs kept by our host when your browser asks for a page.

What is not kept

We count visitors, and that is all the measurement there is. Vercel Web Analytics records that a page was viewed and that the email prompt was shown, dismissed, or answered. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and does not assign you an identifier that persists between days or follows you to any other site, so there is no profile of you and no way to single you out of the count.

There are no heatmaps, no session recordings, and no record of which planets or missions you looked at. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, no third-party pixels, and no data brokers. Your information is never sold, rented, or handed over for anyone to advertise to you.

Cookies

Only the ones that make signing in work: a cookie holding your session so that you stay signed in, and a short-lived one used during Google sign-in to complete the exchange safely. Both are strictly necessary for a feature you asked for, which is why there is no cookie banner to click through.

Clearing your cookies signs you out and loses nothing else.

Why we are allowed to hold it

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR give you rights over your data and require us to name a lawful basis for holding it. The bases we rely on are:

• Performance of a contract: we cannot give you an account without an address to attach it to.
• Legitimate interests: keeping sign-in records so that we can detect and stop abuse of the service, and counting visits so that we know whether the site is worth running and whether the email prompt is worth showing.

We do not ask for consent to the visitor counts because they are cookieless and hold nothing that identifies you. If you would rather not be counted at all, any content blocker stops the script, and nothing on the site behaves differently when it is blocked.

Who else touches it

Two suppliers, both of which process data on our instructions and neither of which may use it for their own purposes:

• Supabase, which provides our database and handles sign-in.
• Vercel, which hosts the site, serves it to your browser, and provides the visitor counts described above.

If you choose to sign in with Google, Google handles that sign-in and tells us the email address on the account. What Google does with the fact that you signed in is covered by Google’s own privacy policy, not this one.

Beyond those, information is only ever disclosed where the law requires it.

Where it lives

Our suppliers run infrastructure in several countries, so your information may be stored or processed outside the country you are in, including outside the UK and the European Economic Area. Where that happens, it is covered by the standard contractual clauses those suppliers publish, which are the safeguards the law provides for exactly this.

How long it is kept

Your account and profile are kept until you ask for them to be deleted, at which point they are removed. Sign-in and server logs age out on our suppliers’ own schedules, which are measured in weeks and months rather than years.

Your rights

Wherever you are, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it, and we will do it. Depending on where you live you may also have the right to receive a copy in a portable form, to object to or restrict what we do with it, and to complain to your national data protection authority if you think we have got it wrong.

Email the address below and say what you want. There is no form and no charge. Deleting your account is the fastest of these: it removes the account and the profile attached to it.

Children

Stellamap is not intended for children under 13, and accounts should not be created by them. It is a map of the solar system and there is nothing on it a child should not see, but an account is a different matter. If you believe a child has created one, email us and it will be removed.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Anything that materially affects what is held about you will be announced in the app rather than quietly edited in.

Getting in touch

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints all go to alessandro.cavazzuti11@gmail.com, and are answered by a person.