Privacy Policy
Neptune is a subscription weather app. It needs your location to give you a forecast, and an email address to give you an account. That is essentially the whole story — there is no advertising, no tracking, and no advertising, analytics or crash-reporting SDK. The iPhone, iPad and Mac apps contain no third-party code at all; the Android app uses Google's own libraries for notifications, billing and the free-trial check, described below. The one thing we measure about the app itself is how smoothly the radar runs on Android phones. That measurement is anonymous, and you can switch it off.
Who we are
Neptune Weather is operated by Aleph Collective LLC ("we", "us"). You can reach us about anything in this policy — including a request to access or delete your data — at support@neptuneweather.io.
What we collect
| Data | Why | When |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | It is your account identifier, and how we send password-reset codes. | When you register. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose to hide your address, we only ever receive Apple's private relay address. |
| Password | Sign-in. | Stored only as a salted hash. We cannot read it and cannot recover it for you. |
| Precise location | To produce a forecast, radar view, and alerts for a specific point on the Earth. A weather app cannot do its job without one. | The place you are viewing; any places you save; and, only if you turn on notifications, your device's current or last known position. |
| Subscription status | To know whether your subscription is active. | On iPhone, iPad and Mac, your device sends Apple's signed transaction receipt and our server verifies its signature. On Android, your device sends Google Play's purchase token; our server asks Google for the subscription and keeps the record Google returns (its order number, billing country, plan, renewal or cancellation state, and any reason you gave Google for cancelling). Google is given only a one-way hash of your account number, so a purchase can be matched to your account. We never receive your payment details — Apple or Google handles the transaction. |
| Push token & notification preferences | To deliver the alerts you asked for to the right device. | Only once you enable a notification toggle. Turning them all off deletes the device record. |
| Alert records | To measure whether our alerts were right — the results are public. | When we send you a rain, hail or rotation alert, or one of those happens at a place we watch for you without an alert: the place it was for, the time, and what happened. After 7 days the record is cut loose from your device and its position is rounded to about 10 km. |
| App preferences | So your unit system, accent colour and light/dark choice follow your account across devices. | When you change them. |
| Radar performance summary (Android only) | To find which phones and graphics chips the 3D radar runs poorly on, so we can fix them. | Once per radar session, unless you turn off Settings → Share anonymous performance data. It holds your phone's model and manufacturer, its graphics chip and driver version, the Android and app versions, the screen's refresh rate, and how the radar performed: how long it was open, how long it took to appear, frame timings, how long storms took to build, and whether the phone was running hot. It holds no account, email, location, IP address or device identifier. We keep only daily totals per phone model and graphics chip, so a phone type that opened the radar once that day is a total of one. |
| Free-trial check | So a free trial can't be restarted by reinstalling the app or making a new account. | When a free trial starts. On Apple devices, Apple's DeviceCheck stores two yes/no flags for your device at Apple; we store nothing about the device. On Android, Google Play Integrity confirms the app and phone are genuine; your phone sends us its Android ID, and we keep only a keyed one-way hash of it, never the ID itself. We also keep a one-way hash of each email address that has had a trial. |
| Calendar event windows | Only if you enable the Plans feature — so we can warn you when weather turns bad for an upcoming event, even while the app is closed. | See "Your calendar" below. Titles never leave your device, and on Android nothing about your events is uploaded. |
What we do not collect
- No advertising or tracking identifiers. We do not track you across apps or websites, we do not use the advertising identifier, and we share nothing with data brokers or ad networks.
- No analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDK. The iPhone, iPad and Mac apps contain no third-party libraries at all. The Android app contains Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging for notifications (Firebase Analytics is not included), Google Play Billing, Google Play Integrity, Google Play In-App Review for the occasional request to rate the app, Google's location services for alerts that follow you, and ML Kit for the terminal's on-device language model, plus open-source code that sends nothing anywhere. The Android radar summary above is our own code. It is anonymous and you can switch it off.
- No payment information.
- No contacts, photos, microphone, camera, or health data.
Your calendar
The Plans feature is off by default. If you turn it on, the app reads your upcoming calendar events on your device (Apple's EventKit on iPhone, iPad and Mac; Android's calendar on Android), works out where and when each one is, and checks the forecast for that place and time. To find an event's place, its location text is sent to Apple's or Google's address lookup.
On iPhone, iPad and Mac, when push notifications are also enabled, so that we can keep watching after you close the app, the app uploads a deliberately minimal record for each tracked event:
- an opaque key — a SHA-256 hash of the event identifier, which we cannot reverse into anything meaningful;
- the event's coordinates, start and end times, and time zone;
- the hazards currently flagged for it, so we do not re-notify you about something you already know.
On Android, nothing about your events is uploaded: the app asks our server for the forecast at each event's coordinates, the same request as any other forecast, and warns you from the phone itself.
Event titles, notes, attendees, and your calendar itself never leave your device. Turning the feature off deletes any uploaded records.
How your location is used
Location permission is requested only when the app needs it, and it is escalated rather than demanded up front: the app asks for access while you use it first, and asks for access all the time only if you want alerts to follow you when the app is closed — "Always" when you turn on notifications on iPhone and iPad, "Allow all the time" when you switch on alerts follow me on Android, after the app explains on screen what that means.
In the background, the app learns your position only when you have moved a meaningful distance: Apple's significant-location-change service on iPhone and iPad, and a geofence from Google's location services on Android, which also checks in every six hours so a phone that hasn't moved keeps its alerts. You choose that distance in Settings (1 km, 5 km, or 15 km). We store one current point per device and overwrite it rather than accumulating a trail. A device whose position has not been updated for seven days stops being monitored automatically.
The one other record of where you were is the alert record above: kept with your device for 7 days while the alert is scored, then cut loose from your device, with its position rounded to about 10 km. There is no lasting location history to leak, subpoena, or sell.
Who else sees anything
We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. Data reaches other parties only in these ways:
- Apple — for sign-in (if you use Sign in with Apple), for subscription billing, for push notification delivery, for the free-trial check (DeviceCheck), and for converting an address into coordinates. Apple's handling is governed by Apple's own privacy policy.
- Google — on Android only: for notification delivery (Firebase Cloud Messaging, which also registers an installation ID with Google), for subscription billing (Google Play), for the free-trial check (Play Integrity), for showing the request to rate the app (Play In-App Review; Google Play shows it and receives your rating, and we never see it), for the phone's position and the alert geofence (Google's location services), for converting an address into coordinates, and for the terminal's language model (ML Kit; the model runs on your phone, and Google may receive usage and performance statistics about it). Google's handling is governed by Google's own privacy policy.
- Our hosting provider — our servers run on Vultr in the United States. They host the machines; they are not given access to use your data.
- Map tile providers — the 3D map's terrain and labels are streamed directly from your device to OpenFreeMap and to the public AWS Terrain Tiles dataset. Those requests carry your device's IP address and the map area you are looking at, but no account information — they have no idea who you are.
- Legal obligation — if we are compelled by valid legal process.
Weather data itself flows the other way: our servers fetch forecasts and radar from public sources (NOAA/NWS, ECMWF, MET Norway, Environment Canada, Deutscher Wetterdienst, and others). Those sources are never told anything about you.
How long we keep it
Account data — your email, saved places, preferences, and subscription state — is kept while your account exists. See Deleting your account below for what deletion removes and what we keep.
Alert records are tied to your device for 7 days, then kept for 400 days with no link to your device and their positions rounded to about 10 km.
Radar and forecast archives we keep for accuracy verification contain no personal data — they are measurements of the atmosphere, not of you.
Radar performance totals are anonymous daily counts by device type, such as how many sessions on a given phone model drew smoothly. We keep them for 90 days. In our own reports, a phone type with fewer than three radar sessions is grouped with the others rather than named.
Deleting your account
In the app: Settings → Account → Delete Account, on iPhone, iPad, Mac or Android. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.
Without the app: email support@neptuneweather.io from the address on your account and ask us to delete it. We will confirm by replying to that address and delete it within 30 days.
Deleting removes your email address and password, sign-in connections such as Sign in with Apple, saved places, preferences, device registrations and their positions, custom alerts, calendar watches, and the alert records still tied to your devices.
We keep, and why:
- Subscription records — what Apple or Google told us about your purchases (never a card number), for our financial records and refunds.
- Promo-code and affiliate records, so commissions can be paid and audited.
- A note that an account existed, with its email address and password removed, and entries in our admin log with your email address replaced by a hash.
- The one-way hashes of your email address and (on Android) your device that stop a second free trial, with nothing linking them to you.
- Records with no link to you — alert records more than 7 days old (positions rounded to about 10 km, kept 400 days) and the anonymous radar performance totals (90 days).
Our database provider's automatic backups roll over within 30 days, so deleted data leaves them by then.
Security
All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Your session tokens are held in the device Keychain on Apple devices and in Android Keystore-encrypted storage on Android. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Access tokens are short-lived and refresh tokens rotate on every use.
Your rights
You can access, correct, export, or delete your data. Deletion is available in the app (see Deleting your account); for anything else, email us and we will respond within 30 days. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, or the CCPA — including the right to complain to your local data protection authority. We do not sell personal information as those laws define it.
Children
Neptune is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us data, contact us and we will delete it.
International transfers
Our servers are in the United States. If you use Neptune from elsewhere, your data is transferred to and processed in the United States.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will update the effective date above and notify you in the app before the change takes effect.