Privacy policy

Last updated: October 22, 2026. WatchSat is a client-side satellite tracker at watchsat.live.

Summary

No user accounts, sign-in, names, or passwords.
Ads served by Google AdSense, which uses cookies to show and measure ads, including personalized ads — see Advertising below for how to opt out.
Traffic measurement with Cloudflare Web Analytics (cookieless) and Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies and shares usage data with Google, including page-speed timings (how long a page took to appear and respond) with no personal data — see the full policy for what it collects and how to opt out.
Public TLE data is fetched via our /api/tle edge proxy and cached locally in your browser.
We do not sell personal data for money. The only personal data you actively give us is for the optional email alerts described below.

Location (pass prediction)

Optional pass prediction uses coordinates rounded to about 1 km, stored only in your browser’s localStorage, and never sent to WatchSat; pass computation runs entirely on-device. Sky mode’s optional weather and ground-imagery requests, and the aurora page’s cloud forecast, do include your rounded coordinates — the full policy’s network-requests section lists every such request. Until you set a location, an approximate one stands in for previews (see below).

Approximate location (day and night look, previews)

Content pages and the blog turn into a light daytime sky while the Sun is up where you are, and stay dark at night. Your browser works this out by itself. It uses your pass-prediction location if you saved one. Otherwise it asks our /api/where endpoint for the approximate location Cloudflare already derives from your IP address, rounded to about 10 km, with the name of the nearest city so the page can say where it is (“near Detroit, MI”). WatchSat does not store or log that answer. Your browser keeps it in localStorage, asks again once a day, and stops using it after a week if it can’t get a fresh one. With neither, your device’s clock decides.

The same approximate place also seeds the sky panels and pass predictions until you set your own: “Above me now”, “Tonight’s sky”, the pass pages, the landing page’s “Tonight over your city”, the aurora check and the Starlink-train page show a preview for it, labelled approximate, instead of asking for a location first. Those previews are computed in your browser and the approximate place stays there: it is never sent anywhere else, and it is never saved as your location. Anything that sends coordinates anywhere (the sky-mode weather and imagery requests, ISS pass alerts) waits for a location you set yourself, with “Use precise location” or a city search. Once you set one it replaces the approximate place everywhere, and if you forget it the approximate place is used again.

ISS pass alerts (optional)

If you subscribe to the optional ISS pass alerts, your email address, coordinates rounded to about 1 km, time zone and alert settings (minimum pass height; mornings, evenings or both) are stored server-side in Cloudflare KV, solely to send the alerts you asked for. To predict the passes, a scheduled GitHub Actions job (GitHub, part of Microsoft) receives the rounded coordinates, time zone and settings of the subscribers due an email, under a keyed identifier that cannot be turned back into your address; your email address never leaves Cloudflare, and the job keeps nothing after it runs. Signup is double opt-in, every alert has an unsubscribe link that deletes the record, and alert emails are sent through our email provider, Resend. If an email to you bounces as undeliverable or is reported as spam, Resend tells us and we delete your subscription. Nothing else changes — the tracker itself still runs with no accounts.

Camera (Live Sky AR)

The optional “Live Sky AR” mode asks for the rear-facing camera only when you start it and grant the browser’s prompt. Frames are shown only on your device as the sky background and are never recorded, stored, or transmitted. Declining falls back to the simulated sky; leaving the mode stops the camera.

What is stored on your device

Six things, all local to your browser: the cached TLE catalog, your optional observer coordinates rounded to about 1 km, the approximate location for the day/night look and previews (rounded to about 10 km, with its city name, refreshed daily), your render-quality preset (High / Balanced / Battery), the launch filter you pick on the launch schedule, and ordinary session state such as the selected satellite and time-warp speed, which is held in memory only. Clearing site data for this origin removes all of it. The full policy lists every network request the app can make, and this summary never replaces it.

The 3D globe also keeps one flag in localStorage once you dismiss its first-visit tip, so the tip shows only once.

Advertising

WatchSat shows ads served by Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to WatchSat and/or other sites on the Internet. Ads may also come from third-party ad networks Google certifies, which may use their own cookies in the same way; Google explains how it uses information from sites that use its services.

You can opt out of personalized advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, and out of many third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info (in Europe, youronlinechoices.eu). Opting out does not remove ads: you still see ads, just not personalized ones. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google shows personalized ads only with your consent. Some U.S. state privacy laws treat personalized-ad cookies as a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information; use the opt-outs above to turn personalized ads off. The embeddable widget (/embed/…) never shows ads.

Contact

Privacy questions: [email protected]. The terms of use cover what you may do with WatchSat’s output.

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