Your evidence. Your call.

The minimum needed to run Sighted, and nothing hidden.

Email address

For account access, password reset and the emails you opt into. Never shared.

Username, display name and avatar

Display name and avatar are optional. What you set is public on your profile.

Sighting reports

Everything you submit when you report: title, description, category, when and where it happened, and any photos, video or notes you attach.

Comments and validations

Your public corroboration history on sightings.

Watcher check-ins

If you check in as an active watcher: an approximate location (rounded to about 11 km before it is stored), sky conditions, equipment and an optional note.

Security metadata

IP address, user agent and timestamps on requests and sign-ins, used for security alerts, rate limiting and abuse prevention.

App usage and diagnostics

In the mobile apps: which screens you open and features you use, tied to a random install id and your member id, sent to us and to Google Analytics for Firebase (no advertising id, no ad personalisation). Crash reports and performance traces go to Sentry without your name or email. Switch usage analytics off in Settings → Privacy → Share usage analytics.

Remote tracker

If you stream your phone with the remote tracker: the live video or stills from its camera, its location and which way it points, its camera settings, and what its motion tracker detects. Kept for 20 minutes unless you save a clip. See “Remote tracker” below.

Purchases and shipping

If you buy a supporter plan or merch: what you bought, and for merch the name, shipping address and phone number you enter at checkout. Card details are entered on Stripe and never reach us.

How you found us

Your optional answer to “Where did you find us?”, and, only if you accept cookies, the campaign tags on the link that first brought you here (utm_ parameters, the referring site and landing page) in a first-party cookie (sx_attr, 90 days) that is attached to your account when you sign up. Ad-platform click ids (such as TikTok’s ttclid or Meta’s fbclid) are kept only if you also allow marketing cookies. Used to see which channels bring people who stick around; never sold or shared.

Request logs are rotated within 30 days. Everything else we store is what you submitted plus what the platform generates about it: timestamps, status and moderation history.

Photo GPS data

Stripped from every photo before it is published.

Browser fingerprints

No fingerprinting scripts, no canvas fingerprinting, and no ad-click identifiers unless you allow marketing cookies.

Advertising trackers

No ad networks, no Meta pixel, no session recording. On the website, analytics run only if you accept them in the cookie banner; in the apps, you can switch them off in Settings.

Government backchannels

No agency has a privileged pipeline to our data. None.

Sold data

We never sell your data. The business model is freemium, not surveillance.

• Show your public sightings on the map and in search results.
• Send you transactional email: verification, password reset, the alerts you subscribe to and a weekly digest of sightings, which you can switch off in notification settings.
• Detect spam, fraud and abuse.
• Produce aggregate, anonymous statistics, including for the public Research API on our roadmap. No personal identifiers.

We do not sell your data, share witness contact info with third parties, or hand reports to governments or intelligence services. If that ever changes, we will tell you in advance and give you the chance to delete your data first.

• Location stripped. GPS, device and serial metadata are removed from photos before they are published. The camera model and capture time are kept with the report, because they help investigators check the evidence.
• Yours to remove. You can remove a photo or video from your report at any time.

Video note. Videos are currently published as uploaded, without metadata stripping. If location matters to you, remove it from a video before you attach it.

You can submit any report anonymously. Your account is still linked to it internally for abuse prevention, but no public page attributes the report to you. You can also keep a report private so it stays off the public map.

• Download your data. One JSON file with your profile, reports, comments, validations, bookmarks, alerts, follows, badges and XP history, from Settings → Danger zone.
• Edit your reports. Correct details on any report you filed. Once a report is confirmed or matched as a duplicate, only its privacy can change.
• Delete your account. Your name, username, picture, bio, location and email are removed and you are signed out everywhere. Your follows, alerts, bookmarks, drafts and notifications are deleted. Your reports stay on the map with no reporter shown, and your comments show as “Deleted member”.
• Opt out of near-me alerts in Settings; we stop using your location for matching.
• Turn off app analytics in the mobile app under Settings → Privacy → Share usage analytics.
• Object. Email privacy@sighted.com and tell us to stop processing your data for any reason. We comply unless legally barred.

The Sighted mobile app asks for:

• Camera and microphone: for the in-app camera, including sound on videos you record.
• Photo library: add-only access, to save your captures. Picking a photo to attach uses the system picker and needs no permission.
• Location: only while the app is open, to tag sightings with where you saw something, place the sky view and show reports near you. The apps never use your location in the background.
• Notifications: to deliver alerts and moderation responses.

Every permission can be revoked in your device settings.

The remote tracker streams your phone's camera, while it is in Watch mode, to your own account so you can watch and control it from a computer. It runs only while you have it switched on and the app open.

• What is uploaded. Live video (no sound) or stills every few seconds, a small preview image, the phone's location and which way it points, its camera settings, battery and temperature, and a snapshot whenever its motion tracker detects something. The location and direction are used to show you which aircraft were in view.
• How long we keep it. Footage is kept for 20 minutes and then deleted automatically, unless you press Save to keep a clip. Saved clips stay until you delete them.
• Private unless you share it. Only you can see your tracker. If you choose to share it on the live map, anyone can watch the feed behind the delay you set, and the map shows an approximate position (about 2 km by default, or more precise only if you choose). Your exact location is never shown unless you pick it. Switching sharing off takes it off the map at once, and nothing still inside the delay is shown.
• Moderation. Viewers can report a public tracker, and moderators can take it off the map.
• Downloads. Video, stills and snapshots downloaded from the tracker carry a Sighted watermark.

Sighted runs on infrastructure from Railway (database, cache and app servers), Vercel (web hosting), Cloudflare (DNS and object storage) and Resend (transactional email). New report text is checked by an AI model from Anthropic as part of the automated spam pre-screen, and reports with their photos can be analysed by OpenAI models to help moderators work out what was seen (an aircraft, a satellite or a planet, for example). Maps are drawn with Mapbox. Payments are processed by Stripe, and merch orders are printed and shipped by Printful. Crash reports from the apps go to Sentry. Google Analytics runs on the website only if you accept analytics cookies, and in the mobile apps (as Google Analytics for Firebase) unless you switch usage analytics off.

These vendors process data only on our instructions and under their own privacy terms.