Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 September 2026.

Short version

Aurora Forecast does not require an account and does not sell personal data. We measure anonymous, aggregate traffic with Google Analytics 4 and show ads served by Google AdSense; both are covered in detail below. No signup is needed and no email address is collected unless you write to us first.

1. What we collect

• Server logs: IP address, user-agent, requested URL, referrer, response code, time. Retained 30 days for abuse and capacity planning, then deleted.
• Anonymous aggregate counts: per-page, per-day, per-country, with no identifier. Retained indefinitely.
• Voluntary emails sent via the contact form — retained until you ask us to delete, or 24 months, whichever is sooner.
• Analytics cookies: Google Analytics 4 sets first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_*) to distinguish visits and count page-views. They contain no personal identifiers, are not used for advertising, and event data is auto-deleted after 14 months.

2. What we do not collect

• We do not sell personal data or share it with data brokers.
• We do not fingerprint your device.
• We do not place advertising cookies before you have consented (where consent is required).
• We do not collect precise location. IP-based city is approximated — by our Cloudflare edge function and, as a fallback, a public IP geolocation service — only to populate the default city box on the first page load, never written to disk.

3. Advertising (Google AdSense)

Aurora Forecast shows ads served by Google AdSense. AdSense and its partners may set cookies to deliver and measure ads, including personalised ads where permitted by your settings and local law. Details are in Google's own policies (policies.google.com/technologies/ads). You can opt out of personalised advertising via Google Ads Settings or the DAA opt-out.

4. Children

The site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. The data sources are public scientific feeds; the editorial content is suitable for all ages.

5. Your rights (GDPR / CCPA)

• Access — write to us and we will list any data about you within 30 days.
• Erasure — same channel; we will delete within 30 days.
• Objection — we will stop processing within 30 days.
• Portability — we will export any data on you in JSON.

Contact: tonightaurora.com/contact.

6. Data sources we depend on

NOAA SWPC, Open-Meteo, Cloudflare (edge geolocation for the default-city feature), ipapi.co (IP-to-city fallback), and Google (Analytics 4 and AdSense). Each has its own privacy policy that governs the data we receive from them.

7. Changes

Material changes will be reflected here with a new "last updated" date. We do not retroactively re-process old data without a new consent flow where required by law.