Privacy policy

Last updated 28 September 2026. This policy covers the AircraftIQ app and aircraftiq.app.

AircraftIQ has no accounts, no advertising, and no analytics or tracking software. It does not build a profile of you and does not sell or share data for advertising. What follows is everything the app sends off your device, and why.

Your location

Sky, the live map and Camera use your location, and only while the app is open. AircraftIQ never tracks you in the background.

Aircraft overhead. To find the aircraft around you, your position, rounded to four decimal places (about 11 metres), is sent directly to the public ADS-B service api.adsb.lol. If that fails, the same request goes to AircraftIQ's own server, which asks the public services adsb.lol, adsb.fi and airplanes.live in turn.
Place name. To show the name of where you are, Sky sends your position to the place-name service BigDataCloud (api.bigdatacloud.net).
Photos. When a photo has a location, a position rounded to two decimal places (about 1 kilometre) is sent to the same ADS-B services to look up which aircraft were flying nearby when it was taken.

Searching for a place or airport by name sends the words you type to the Open-Meteo geocoding service. Map and weather-radar imagery is fetched from Esri (ArcGIS) and RainViewer for the area on screen. Flight and airframe details are looked up by an aircraft's callsign or transponder code from adsbdb.com, through AircraftIQ's server or directly.

Photos and questions: identification by AI

Camera and Ask are answered by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The app asks for your consent before the first photo or question is sent.

Camera sends the photo you choose, with its location and other embedded metadata removed first. When the photo had a location, the aircraft found nearby are sent with it, described by their registration, type and distance and direction from you.
Ask sends the question you type and the conversation so far.

These requests go through AircraftIQ's server and the OpenRouter AI gateway to Anthropic. If you add your own Anthropic API key in Ask, requests go straight from your device to Anthropic instead, and the key is kept only on your device. They are used only to identify aircraft and answer your question. AircraftIQ's server passes them on and does not store them; Anthropic and OpenRouter handle them under their own privacy policies.

What stays on your device

Motion and orientation data, used to point Sky at the sky, never leaves your device.
Your logbook of aircraft you have spotted is kept on your device and is not uploaded.
Your settings, such as the chosen skin and your AI consent, are stored only on your device.
The recognition guides are part of the app; browsing and identifying by shape happen on your device.

The website

aircraftiq.app is served by our host, Vercel. The site sets no advertising or analytics cookies; it stores its settings and logbook in your browser's local storage, and keeps an offline copy of the guide in your browser's cache.

Children

AircraftIQ is a general-audience field guide. It does not ask for anyone's name, email address or age.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or about this policy, go to IQ Labs, which makes AircraftIQ. If this policy changes, the date at the top will change with it.