Effective 6 August 2026 · Supersedes all previous versions
This policy tries to be specific instead of reassuring. It names every service that receives your data, says plainly what stays on your device, and tells you what survives when you delete your account.
SkyBrief is an iOS application for general aviation pilots, operated by Rohith Velmurugan ("SkyBrief", "we", "us"). For UK and EU data protection law we are the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: skybrief.app@gmail.com.
SkyBrief is a supplemental planning aid. It is not an official weather briefing service and it does not file flight plans.
You can sign in with Apple, Google, or an email address and password. Authentication is handled by Firebase Authentication (Google). We receive and store your email address, a user ID, and — where the provider supplies it — your name. If you use Sign in with Apple with Hide My Email, we only ever receive Apple's private relay address, never your real one.
Stored on our servers (Google Cloud Firestore) so it syncs across devices and drives alerts:
If the app hits an unexpected error we record the error message, the software stack trace, where it happened and when, saved against your own profile record. This is how we find and fix bugs. It is technical diagnostic data, not a record of what you were doing. Only the most recent one is kept.
We count how often features are used — briefings run, routes planned, quizzes taken, paywall views, purchases and roughly fifty other counters — plus a tally of how many times each airport identifier is looked up across all users.
These are aggregate totals only: running counts per day, not linked to your account, your device or a session. The one exception is the "last opened" timestamp on your profile described above, which is per-user.
With your permission, SkyBrief uses your device location to suggest nearby weather stations, to compute glide range, and — only while you have explicitly armed the flight tracker — to record your flight track in the background.
Your GPS track is never uploaded. It is written to your device and stays there. What does reach our servers is described above: the coordinates of your chosen home airport, and the waypoint coordinates of routes you brief. Weather providers also necessarily receive coordinates when we request a forecast or a radar tile for an area you are viewing.
Subscriptions are sold by Apple. We never see your payment card. RevenueCat processes subscription state on our behalf and receives your Apple transaction receipts along with your SkyBrief user ID.
The following is stored locally and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else. It is deleted when you delete the app:
A single cached weather report is also shared with the SkyBrief home-screen widget through a private iOS app group on your device.
We do not use your data to train machine learning models. The plain-English briefing is produced by a rule-based engine that runs on your device; no language model is involved, and your weather queries are not sent to any AI service.
The complete list. Each of these has its own privacy policy governing what it does with what it receives.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase | Account credentials, your profile, briefings, dispatch records, crash reports | Sign-in and our database |
| RevenueCat | Your SkyBrief user ID, Apple purchase receipts, subscription state | Subscription management |
| Apple | Purchases, and your advertising identifier if you allow tracking | App Store, billing, sign-in |
| Meta (Facebook, Instagram) | App install and session events, registration and purchase events, device data, advertising identifier if allowed | Advertising measurement |
| TikTok | Login, registration, trial and purchase events, device data, advertising identifier if allowed | Advertising measurement |
| Expo | Your push token and notification contents; app update requests | Push delivery, app updates |
| Resend | Your email address and the briefing content sent to you | Daily briefing and dispatch emails |
| beehiiv | Your email address — only if you opt into the newsletter | Newsletter |
| NOAA / aviationweather.gov | Your IP address and the station or area you request | METARs, TAFs, charts |
| Open-Meteo | Your IP address and the coordinates requested | Forecasts, winds aloft, soundings |
| RainViewer | Your IP address and map tile coordinates | Radar imagery |
| FAA services | Your IP address and the airport, plate or camera requested | TFRs, weather cameras, approach plates |
| AirNav, aviation-fuel-prices.com | Your IP address and the airport requested | Fuel prices |
| GitHub Pages | Standard web server logs for this website | Website hosting |
Requesting weather necessarily reveals your IP address and what you asked about to the provider — that is how the internet works, not a choice we made. We do not attach your name or account to those requests.
We may also disclose data if required by law, to protect someone's safety, or as part of a business transfer. We will not sell your personal information for money.
SkyBrief supports flight training, which means some data is shared on purpose when you join an instructor or a school. This only happens if you actively join using an invite or a school code.
Once you are connected to an instructor or school, members of that organisation can access your profile information — including your name, email address, home airport, certificates and ratings, personal minimums, study weak areas, and technical diagnostic data on your record.
In addition, these records are created and shared by design:
Your logbook, your flight tracks and your individual quiz answers are not shared. Only the three-topic weak-area summary is.
If you leave a school, records the school is required to keep for regulatory purposes remain with that school — see section 11. If you want to know what your school holds about you, ask the school; they control those records.
We advertise SkyBrief on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok, and we include their measurement SDKs in the app so we can tell which ads actually lead to installs and subscriptions.
On first launch, iOS asks whether you allow SkyBrief to track you across apps and websites — the App Tracking Transparency prompt.
You can change this at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. Nothing in the app stops working if you decline — no features are gated on it, and we do not ask twice.
We do not sell your personal information for money, and we never sell or share your flight activity, logbook, routes or weather history with advertisers. However, under some US state privacy laws the sharing of advertising identifiers for measurement can itself be treated as a "sale" or a "share" — see section 13 for how to opt out.
Daily briefing email. This is switched on by default when you create an account. It sends one email each morning with the weather at your home airport. You can turn it off in Settings at any time, or use the unsubscribe link in the email.
Push notifications. Only if you grant permission. Storm alerts and personal-minimums alerts are individually controllable in Settings. To send them, our servers read your home airport, your recently briefed routes, your notification preferences and your time zone.
Dispatch emails. If your school uses dispatch, submitting a request emails your school's administrator with your name and the details of that request.
Newsletter. Opt-in only, and separate from everything above.
If you are in the UK or EEA, we rely on:
SkyBrief is currently built around US airspace and FAA rules. We make it available in other countries, but the content is US-focused.
You can delete your account in the app under Settings. This removes your account and your profile record, and cancels the newsletter subscription if you had one.
We would rather be accurate than comforting, so: deleting your account does not erase everything everywhere. The following can remain:
If you want us to erase everything we can, including anything the in-app deletion leaves behind, email skybrief.app@gmail.com from your account address and we will do it manually. We will confirm when it is done.
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
Email skybrief.app@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 30 days, and we will not charge you or degrade your service for exercising these rights.
UK and EEA users may complain to their supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.
If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Oregon, Montana or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have rights to know, access, correct and delete your personal information, and to opt out of targeted advertising and of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information. You also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them.
To opt out of the advertising sharing described in section 7, decline the App Tracking Transparency prompt, or turn tracking off in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. That is the most effective control and it takes effect immediately. You can also email us and we will action it.
The categories of personal information we collect, and the third parties we disclose them to, are listed in sections 2 and 5. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. We honour Global Privacy Control signals on this website.
You may use an authorised agent to make a request. We may need to verify your identity by confirming that you control the account email address.
We are based in the United States and our service providers are primarily located there. If you use SkyBrief from outside the US, your data will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may not offer the same level of legal protection as your home country. Where required, our providers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards. By using SkyBrief you understand that this transfer is necessary to provide the service.
SkyBrief is intended for pilots and student pilots and is not directed to children under 13. You must be at least 13 to create an account, and if you are in the EEA or UK, at least 16 — or have permission from a parent or guardian.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal information, email skybrief.app@gmail.com and we will delete the account and its data promptly.
Young people do begin flight training before 16, sometimes well before. If a minor is training with a school through SkyBrief, we expect the school and a parent or guardian to be involved in that decision, and a parent or guardian may contact us at any time to review or delete their child's data.
Data is transmitted over encrypted connections and stored on Google Cloud infrastructure with access rules that restrict who can read what. Access to production data is limited to the operator of the service. Data held only on your device is protected by your device's own encryption and passcode.
No system is perfectly secure and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify affected users and the relevant authorities as required by law. If you find a security problem, please report it to skybrief.app@gmail.com — we would much rather hear from you than not.
skybriefapp.com sets no cookies and uses no third-party analytics service. We count page views using two anonymous numbers — a daily total and a per-page total. No IP address, device fingerprint, referrer or visitor identifier is recorded, and there is no way to identify or follow an individual visitor. We honour Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control browser signals, which switch off even that counter.
Our short download links count how many times each creator or referral code was used, again as anonymous totals with nothing about the visitor attached. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which keeps its own server logs.
If we change this policy materially — new categories of data, a new advertising partner, a new purpose — we will update the effective date at the top and notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use SkyBrief after that means you accept the updated policy.
Questions, requests or corrections: skybrief.app@gmail.com.
If something in this policy does not match what the app actually does, that is a bug and we want to know about it.