Privacy policy

Aviators.co is a community-first airfield discovery service for European general aviation. For the purposes of GDPR, the data controller is the Aviators.co team. You can reach us about anything in this policy — including exercising your rights — at privacy@aviators.co.

We run our own infrastructure on servers located in the European Union. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.

Aviators.co is currently a read-only service: you can browse airfields, search, and view weather without an account. What we process today is limited to:

• Server logs. When you visit the site, our servers automatically record technical information needed to operate and secure the service — your IP address, the page or API endpoint requested, timestamp, response status, referrer, and user-agent string. These logs are structured and short-lived (see retention below).
• Anything you send us. If you email us, we keep the contents of that correspondence to respond and for our records.

Coming with accounts (Phase 2). When sign-up and contributions launch, we will also process your account details (email address, authentication credentials, and any profile information you choose to add) and the content you submit (reviews, photos, fee reports, and edits). This policy will be updated in the same release, before those features collect any data.

• To run and secure the site. Server logs let us deliver pages, diagnose errors, prevent abuse, and protect against attacks. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating a reliable, secure service (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
• To respond to you. If you contact us, we use your message to reply. Legal basis: legitimate interest, or steps taken at your request.
• For accounts and contributions (Phase 2). When available, account and submission data will be processed to provide the account, publish the content you choose to share, and moderate it. Legal basis: performance of our terms with you (Art. 6(1)(b)) and our legitimate interest in a trustworthy community.

Aviators.co does not currently set any cookies, and we do not use analytics, advertising, or third-party tracking technologies. Our fonts and map assets are served from our own infrastructure, so simply browsing the site does not share your data with third parties for tracking purposes.

When accounts launch, we will use a small number of strictly necessary cookies to keep you signed in and to protect your session — these are essential to a feature you actively choose to use (signing in) and do not track you across other sites. If we ever introduce any non-essential cookies, we will ask for your consent first through a cookie banner before they are set.

We do not sell your personal data and we keep sharing to a minimum. We rely on a small set of providers strictly to operate the service — for example, hosting and infrastructure on our own EU-based servers. Any provider that processes personal data on our behalf does so under a data-processing agreement and only on our instructions.

The aviation data, map tiles, and weather you see are drawn from upstream sources (OurAirports, OpenAIP, OpenStreetMap, and the NOAA Aviation Weather Center). We fetch and cache this data server-side; we do not pass your personal data to these sources when you browse. We may also disclose data where required by law.

Aviators.co is self-hosted on servers located in the European Union, and we keep your data within the EU. If that ever changes, or if a provider involves a transfer outside the EU/EEA, we will ensure an appropriate safeguard (such as an adequacy decision or Standard Contractual Clauses) is in place and update this policy.

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes above:

• Server logs are retained for a short period (typically up to 30 days) for security and troubleshooting, then deleted or anonymised.
• Correspondence is kept for as long as needed to handle your query and a reasonable period afterwards for our records.
• Account and submitted content (Phase 2) will be kept while your account is active. If you delete your account, we will delete or anonymise your personal data, though published community contributions may be retained in anonymised form so the shared information remains useful.

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased ("right to be forgotten");
• restrict or object to certain processing;
• receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format; and
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

To exercise any of these, email us at privacy@aviators.co. We will respond within one month. Once accounts launch, data export and account deletion will also be available as self-service tools in your account settings.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority if you believe we have not handled your data properly.

We protect the service with encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), access controls, and regular backups. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable technical and organisational measures to safeguard your data and will notify you and the relevant authority of a breach where the law requires it.

Aviators.co is intended for pilots and aviation enthusiasts and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

As Aviators.co grows — particularly when accounts and contributions launch — we will update this policy and revise the "last updated" date above. Material changes that affect your rights will be communicated clearly. Continuing to use the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions, requests, or concerns about your privacy? Email privacy@aviators.co. You can also read more about our data sources or about the project.