A summary, written to be read. The full Privacy 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, and they are never uploaded. There is no analytics library and no feature-flag service.

Two switches decide what is sent about your runs. Both are under Help → Check for updates, and both are on unless you turn them off. The first sends a note when a run finishes: how long it took, how many frames went in, the settings and the processing log, with every file name and folder taken out. The second, which Akastroid asks about the first time it opens, sends the finished picture in full with the telescope and camera names, the frame count and the exposure. After a deep-sky or planetary run it also sends the stacked image the picture was made from, made smaller when over 45 MB. Never your frames or any file name.

Apart from those two switches, three network requests exist, and none of them carries your images. If update checking is on, which it is by default, Akastroid asks a file hosted on GitHub whether a newer version has been released, sending the version you are running and your platform. Behind that same switch, it reports once that this version opened successfully, which is how we estimate how many downloads never get past Gatekeeper. And if you enter a licence key, it activates it against our server once. As with any request over the internet, your IP address is visible to the host serving it. Nothing else is sent.

Turn the switches off under Help → Check for updates, and with no key entered, 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 catalog used for color 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. I use it to see which guides bring people who go on to download. Your photographs are not involved. There is no advertising and no ad tracking.

The application is different. No analytics code exists in it. The run notes and pictures described above go to our own server, never to Google Analytics.

To opt out, use a browser or extension that blocks trackers, or Google's opt-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 summarized as "we have updated our policy".

The full policy

Questions: hello@akastroid.com