A summary, written to be read. The fullPrivacy Policy is the operative document, and it governs where the two differ.

The application

Akastroid runs entirely on your computer. Your frames are read from disk, processed in memory and written back to disk. Nothing about your photographs is ever uploaded. There is no telemetry, no crash reporter, no analytics and no feature-flag service.

One network request exists, and this is it. If update checking is on — it is by default — Akastroid asks a file hosted on GitHub whether a newer version has been released. That request sends the version you are running and your platform, and, as with any request over the internet, your IP address is visible to the host serving it. It sends nothing else, and nothing about your images.

Turn it off under Help → Check for updates and the application makes no network requests at all. It works identically either way, including with the machine disconnected. You do not have to take our word for this: run it behind Little Snitch, LuLu or your firewall's logging and watch.

There is no account. You do not sign in to use it, and it does not know who you are.

The star catalogue used for colour calibration and annotation ships inside the application. Matching your field against it happens locally; no coordinates leave the machine.

Scratch files

Processing a deep-sky session writes registered frames to a temporary cache, because a full session is larger than memory. That cache lives in your system temporary directory and is deleted when the session closes. If the application is force-quit, the cache is reclaimed automatically on a later launch.

This website

This site runs Google Analytics, which sets cookies and records which pages are visited, roughly where from, and which search or link sent you. It answers one question — which guides bring people who go on to download — and nothing about your photographs is involved, because they never reach this site. There is no advertising and no ad tracking.

The application is a different matter, and the distinction is the point.No analytics code exists in it. Nothing installed on your computer reports to this site, and this site knows nothing about what you process.

To opt out, use a browser or extension that blocks trackers, or Google'sopt-out add-on. Standard server logs — IP address, page requested, timestamp — are kept by the host for a short period for operational purposes.

Payment

If you buy a licence, the payment is handled by our payment processor, who receives the details necessary to take it. We receive your email address so we can send you a licence key and, if you ask for one, a refund. We do not receive your card details.

Email

If you write to us, we keep the correspondence so we can answer follow-ups. We do not add you to a mailing list because you contacted support.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the change will be described here rather than summarised as "we have updated our policy".

The full policy

Questions: hello@akastroid.com

Privacy, briefly.