Atlas Privacy Policy
1. Summary
- Atlas needs no account, shows no ads, and contains no analytics or tracking tools.
- Atlas Pro, an optional subscription, is bought through Apple. I never receive your payment details, and your subscription is checked with Apple from your phone.
- Your precise location is used on your phone only.
- The app downloads public information directly from governments, international organizations and map services. The weather and the satellite fire data come through Atlas’s own server, which keeps no record of what you asked for and does not keep your IP address.
2. Who is responsible
Developer: LI YAN-SHAN (“I”), an individual developer in Taiwan.
Contact: [email protected]
Users in the EU or the UK who need a postal address may ask for it by email.
3. Your location
If you allow location access, the app uses your precise location on your phone to find events near you and how far away they are, to alert you only when something happens nearby, to find the nearest shelters and fire and police stations, and to show the weather and the local time where you are. Some lists are built into the app, such as Taiwan’s air-raid shelters and fire and police stations and Singapore’s civil defence shelters, so looking them up sends nothing.
Location is optional: without it the app still shows information worldwide, and you can add places to My places by hand. The app does not track your location in the background. When it checks for new alerts in the background, it uses only an approximate location kept on the phone (a grid of about 5 km).
4. What the app sends, and to whom
To download data, the app connects to these services as you use it:
| Purpose | What is sent | Recipient |
|---|---|---|
| Weather | Your location and the places in My places, rounded to about 1 km | Atlas’s server, which gets the forecast from MET Norway (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute) for you; if the server does not answer, the app asks MET Norway directly. For places in Japan the app downloads the Japan Meteorological Agency’s forecast for the area instead, which sends no coordinates. |
| Satellite fire hotspots | No location | Atlas’s server (from NASA FIRMS) |
| Base map | The map area you are viewing (tile numbers) | OpenFreeMap |
| Satellite and aerial imagery (realistic look) | The map area you are viewing | NASA GIBS; the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan |
| 3D terrain | The map area you are viewing | Mapterhorn |
| 3D close-up of an event | The area around the event | Apple Maps |
| Nearby shelters and meeting points; Japan’s hazard maps | Map tiles around you and the places in My places (about 5 to 40 km across) | The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Norway’s Directorate for Civil Protection, Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency, Switzerland’s Federal Office for Civil Protection, the district of Vorpommern-Greifswald (Germany), the Autonomous Province of Bolzano (Italy), the City of Kyiv |
| Warnings, earthquakes, typhoons, outages and other data | No coordinates. Some sources are downloaded only when you or a place in My places are near them, so a source could tell roughly which country or region you are in from what was downloaded. | Governments and international organizations (the full list, with links, is in Settings > Data sources) |
Like any website you visit, these services see your IP address and may keep request logs under their own policies (for example up to 90 days at MET Norway and up to 30 days at Mapterhorn). They are in various countries and each has its own privacy policy.
5. Atlas’s server
- The server (atlas.virelo8.com) is in Canada (OVH) and is reached through Cloudflare’s network (United States). Both see the IP address of each connection; Cloudflare handles it under its own policy.
- It passes on public data only, fetching each piece once for everyone.
- It does not log the address or the query of a request, such as a weather location, and does not keep IP addresses. Its log holds only the source’s name, the result and how long it took.
- It keeps weather answers in memory for at most 3 hours, so that people in the same area share one, because MET Norway asks that the same place not be requested again within 3 hours. They are not written to disk and are not stored with any IP address.
6. Data kept on your phone
The following stays on your phone, and I cannot access it: your settings (language, appearance, alert radius, layers turned on); the names and coordinates of My places (up to five, or twenty with Atlas Pro); whether you have Atlas Pro, as Apple last said; the events you follow; background check records and the approximate location; caches of downloaded data; the home screen widget’s contents (place names and event titles only, no coordinates).
You can delete all of it in Settings > Data on this phone; deleting the app deletes it too.
7. Purchases and subscriptions
- Atlas Pro is sold through the App Store. Apple handles the payment, and I never receive your card or bank details, your name or your Apple Account.
- When you buy, restore or open Atlas Pro, iOS checks it with Apple from your phone. The app keeps Apple’s answer on the phone, so that Pro is there at the next launch, and sends nothing about your purchase to Atlas’s server.
- Apple gives me sales reports that do not identify you, such as how many subscriptions were sold in each country.
- Apple’s own privacy policy covers the purchase itself.
8. Translation and diagnostics
- Translation uses Apple’s on-device translation and runs on your phone.
- If you choose in iPhone Settings to share analytics with app developers, Apple may give me crash reports and usage statistics, which do not identify you.
9. Legal basis and retention
- Basis: providing the features you use, such as getting the weather for your location or Atlas Pro once you subscribe, and my legitimate interest in providing the service. Location access is your choice and can be turned off at any time in iOS Settings.
- Retention: I keep no data that identifies you. Data on your phone stays until you clear it or delete the app; the server’s weather copies are gone within 3 hours; third parties keep logs under their own policies.
10. Push notifications (planned)
Alerts today are local notifications created by the phone itself. If push notifications are added, I will update this policy and ask for your consent first. The app will then send my server:
- the push device token;
- the regions you subscribe to (countries, or large areas such as states or prefectures), computed on the phone, without your precise location or the area around you;
- your language and alert thresholds.
The server sends a region’s alerts to its subscribers, and your phone decides whether they are near you. This data is used only to deliver alerts, is not used for advertising or tracking, and contains nothing that names you, such as a name or an email address. It is deleted when the token expires, after 30 days without an update, or when you turn alerts off.
11. Children
Atlas is a general-audience app, is not directed to children under 13, and collects no personal data from anyone.
12. Your rights
You may access, correct or delete your data, object to processing, or withdraw consent. Because I keep no data that identifies you, you can do all of this with the app’s clear-data function and the iOS permission settings. For any question, write to the address above; I will reply within 30 days. You may also complain to the data protection authority where you live.
13. Security
The app connects only over HTTPS, contains no keys or passwords, and keeps your precise location on the phone.
14. Changes
When this policy changes, I will update its version and date on this page, and announce significant changes in the app.