Privacy Policy

TailzIN is a place to publish aircraft photographs. This page explains what we collect, what we do with it, where it lives, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Who we are

TailzIN is run by an individual based in Israel. There is no company behind it yet — it is one person's project.

For anything on this page, including a request to see or delete your data, write to [email protected].

What we collect

What you tell us. A username, an email address, a password (we never see it — it is hashed by our authentication provider), and your date of birth. Optionally: your real name, a profile picture, a bio, your camera gear, your home airport, and the year you started spotting. We do not ask for a phone number and we hold none.

Your photographs, and what they carry. The image files you upload, and the camera settings we read out of them: camera body, lens, focal length, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, and when the photo was taken. Plus whatever you tell us about the aircraft — registration, airline, type, airport, runway, route, livery, and your description.

Location data is the exception, and it is worth reading twice. Many cameras and every phone write GPS coordinates into a photo. We remove those coordinates from every published copy of your photo, before it reaches anyone else. They are never stored in our database and never appear on the site.

The original file you uploaded is a different thing. It still contains whatever your camera recorded, GPS included. We keep it in private storage that is not served to anybody: the only way to download it is for you, signed in as its owner. Nobody else has a route to it — not other spotters, not moderators.

Airport arrivals, if you switch them on. This one is off unless you turn it on, in the mobile app, under Settings → Notifications → Airport arrivals. It is the only feature that uses where you are, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

When it is on, your phone asks us once for a list of the airports near you, and then watches for them itself. Your phone does the watching — iOS holds the list and tells the app only when you have actually reached one. We do not receive a stream of your location, we do not receive your location when you arrive, and there is nowhere in our database that a coordinate of yours could be written.

What we receive is the airport code you reached, and the time. We keep that for 30 days and then delete it. It is what lets us send "Welcome to LAX" and show you the spotting locations there, and it is the whole of what we learn.

To ask which airports are near you, your phone does send us a rough position — deliberately rounded to about 11 kilometres before it leaves your device, which is coarser than a city. We use it to answer that one question and store no copy of it.

You can turn this off at any time in the same place, and turning it off stops the watching straight away. Turning it off is not the same as silencing the notification: you can also leave the watching on and just mute the alert, under the notification settings.

What you do here. Likes, saved photos and collections, comments, who you follow, the squads you join, meetups you RSVP to, reports you file, and feedback you send us.

A little technical data. Session cookies to keep you signed in. For the early-access form, a one-way hash of your IP address, used only to stop one person submitting the form fifty times. We cannot recover an IP address from it. And, only if you allow it, which pages and screens get opened — see Cookies and measurement below.

What we use it for

To run your account and show your photographs to the people you published them for. To verify your email address. To send you the emails the site owes you — an invite, a decision on your access request, a reply to a bug you reported. To look up an aircraft by its registration so the record beside your photo is right. And to moderate: to act on reports, and to suspend accounts that need suspending.

Occasionally, a note about what you missed. If you have not opened TailzIN for a while, we may send you one email saying what happened while you were away — how many new photographs went up, what turned up at your base airport, how close you are to your next badge. It is written from things already on the site, and we do not send it to somebody there is nothing to tell.

Every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, with no need to sign in, and it keeps working long after the email was sent. Use it and we stop — it does not affect the emails the site owes you, like an invite or a reply to something you reported. We record that we sent it and that you opted out, and nothing else.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it for advertising. We do not profile you, and there is no automated decision-making anywhere on the site.

What is public

Almost everything you post, deliberately. A published photograph is visible to anyone, along with its caption, its camera settings, the aircraft details and the airport. So is your profile — your username, picture, bio, gear, home airport — and your likes, comments, follows and squad memberships.

Turning the watermark off does not make a photo private. It only means no mark is added.

Once TailzIN opens to the public, these pages will be indexed by search engines.

Not public, ever: your email address, your date of birth, the original files you upload, and any airport arrival recorded for you — that last one is visible to nobody but you.

Where it lives, and who else touches it

We use a small number of services to run TailzIN. Each one only handles what it needs to:

• Supabase — the database and sign-in, holding your account and everything you post. Servers in Ireland.
• Cloudflare — your photographs, both the private originals and the public versions, and the network that carries every request to us. Photo storage is in Germany.
• Our own server — runs the website itself, and the background service that reads camera settings, strips GPS and adds watermarks. Germany.
• Our own mail server — the emails we send you. Frankfurt, Germany.
• AeroDataBox and AirLabs — aircraft lookups. We send them a registration number and nothing about you.
• Apple and Google — delivering push notifications to your phone, if you turn them on. They receive a device token and the notification itself, and nothing else about you.
• Anthropic — helps us write up where to stand and watch at an airport, and check an aircraft type that looks wrong. We send it airport and aircraft details. Nothing about you, and none of your photographs, is ever sent.

Your account, your photographs and the website that serves them are now entirely in the European Union. They are stored in Europe and processed in Europe. We previously ran the website on servers in the United States under the European Commission's 2021 Standard Contractual Clauses; that transfer no longer happens.

Three of the services above sit outside the EU, and it is worth being exact about what each one gets:

• Apple and Google, for push notifications, receive a device token and the text of the notification. That is the only way a notification can reach a phone, and it happens only if you turn them on.
• Anthropic receives airport and aircraft details — no account data, no photographs, nothing that identifies you.
• AeroDataBox and AirLabs receive an aircraft registration number and nothing else.

None of these receives your email address, your date of birth, your location, or your photographs.

How long we keep it

Your account and everything on it stay until you delete them. Deleted photographs are removed from storage by a background job. We keep a short-lived cache of aircraft lookups, which contains no personal data.

Airport arrivals are the exception, and they delete themselves. If you have that feature on, the record that you reached a particular airport is kept for 30 days and then removed. That is a real deletion rather than a promise to stop showing it to you.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, from your settings. Here is exactly what happens:

• Immediately, everything you posted disappears from the site — your photographs, your comments, your announcements. Nobody can see them any more.
• For 90 days, we keep it, so you can change your mind. Sign back in and cancel, and everything comes back.
• After 90 days, it is permanently deleted, including the original files.

The 90 days are for you to reverse the decision, not a period during which your photographs stay up. They come down the moment you press the button.

If a moderator removed something of yours before you left, it stays removed — restoring your account does not bring it back.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, send you a copy, or stop using it in a particular way. Write to [email protected] and we will answer within 30 days. There is no charge.

You can change most things yourself in your settings. Your date of birth is the exception — for obvious reasons you cannot edit it, so email us if it is wrong.

If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country. We would rather you told us first, but you do not have to.

Cookies and measurement

We set cookies to keep you signed in, your theme choice is remembered in your browser, and tailzin_consent remembers the answer you give below. Those three are strictly necessary — without them the site cannot work — so they are not something we ask about.

We use Google Analytics 4 to count page views, and whether we ask you first depends on where you are.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, it does not load until you allow it. The first time you visit we ask, plainly. Say no and no Google script is ever added to the page, no _ga or _gid cookie is ever set, and nothing is sent — refusing is not a setting we remember and quietly work around, it is the script never being there.

Everywhere else it is on when you arrive, and you can turn it off at Settings → Privacy. We tell you it is running rather than leaving you to find out.

If we cannot tell where you are, we ask. An address we cannot place, a first page load before we have worked it out — every one of those is treated as though you were in Europe. The uncertainty is resolved in your favour, not ours.

Either way the switch is the same switch, and it does the same thing: turning it off deletes those cookies from your browser and stops collection there and then.

The TailzIN apps for iOS and Android measure the same thing through Firebase Analytics, under the same rule and the same regional line. In Europe, the UK and Switzerland they ask when you accept these documents, they start switched off, and continuing without ticking the box leaves them off. Elsewhere they start on and say so on that same screen. The app decides which by reading the region your phone is already set to — it does not ask anyone where you are, and nothing about your location leaves the device to answer it. There is a switch in the app's own settings either way. The apps read no advertising identifier and show no tracking prompt, because there is nothing to prompt about.

What we never send, on any platform: what you search for, your captions, which aircraft you looked at, your handle, or any link from a message or an invite. What we do send is which KIND of page was opened — a hub, a search, a profile — and nothing that identifies you to Google as a person.

Google Signals, advertising personalisation, and sharing your data with Google's advertising products are all switched off, and we commit to keeping them off.

Under-16s

You need to be at least 13 to use TailzIN. If you are under 16, you need a parent or guardian's permission, and we ask you to confirm you have it when you sign up.

If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email [email protected] and we will remove it.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will ask you to read and agree to it the next time you sign in. Small corrections — a typo, a clearer sentence — will not interrupt you.