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Privacy Policy

Last updated · 11 October 2026

Moose is a small, independently-built app that shows aurora (northern lights) visibility forecasts. This page explains, plainly, what data it touches and why. There's no account system, no analytics SDK, and no advertising in the app — most of what follows is about where your location goes when the app checks the sky on your behalf.

In short

  • The Moose app sends us no data at all. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no Moose server. Your location goes straight from your phone to a public weather service to get your forecast, and your settings never leave your phone.
  • This website (auroramoose.com) uses Google Analytics to count visits and clicks, and shop links go to Amazon. See section 08.

01 What Moose collects

Moose uses your device's location (fine or coarse — whichever you grant) to look up sky conditions for where you are, or for a city you search for manually instead. That's the only personal data the app handles. There's no sign-up, no name, no email collected inside the app, and no unique advertising or analytics identifier.

If you email support, we naturally see your email address and whatever you tell us — used only to help with your question.

02 Where your location goes

Your coordinates are sent — directly from your device, never through a Moose-run server, because none exists — to the public weather and space-weather APIs the app reads from:

Service
Operator
What it receives
Open-Meteo
Open-Meteo.com
Latitude/longitude, to return cloud cover, and to match a city name during search
NOAA SWPC
US NOAA (govt., public)
No location — this feed (Kp, Bz, solar wind, aurora oval imagery) is the same for everyone
Light-pollution map
David Lorenz (djlorenz.github.io)
No location — the app downloads the same public world map for everyone and reads your spot from it on your phone

None of them is asked to identify you, and none receives anything beyond (for Open-Meteo) a coordinate pair and the minimum request metadata any web request carries (IP address, at the network level).

03 What stays on your device

Your saved locations, alert preferences, alert history, and language choice are stored locally in the app's own storage on your phone — never uploaded anywhere. Uninstalling the app deletes all of it. If you use the home-screen widget, the same local snapshot is what it reads.

04 Notifications

With alerts turned on, Moose checks conditions roughly every 30 minutes in the background and may notify you when your saved sky is dark, clear, and active. This runs entirely on your device — no push-notification server is involved, and no one but you sees that a notification fired.

05 Live cams and tips

The Live Cams tab embeds video from YouTube. Opening a cam loads content from Google's servers under YouTube's own privacy policy — Moose itself doesn't add any tracking on top of that embed.

Optional tips are processed entirely by Google Play's billing system. Moose never sees your payment details — only that a tip of a given amount was completed, for the purpose of saying thanks.

06 Children's privacy

Moose isn't directed at children and doesn't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

07 Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the "last updated" date above will change with it. Continued use of the app after an update means you accept the revised policy.

08 This website

Everything above is about the Moose app. This website (auroramoose.com) works a little differently:

  • Google Analytics 4. We use it to see which pages are read, which links are clicked (including shop links and share buttons) and roughly where visitors come from. It sets first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_*), and Google processes your IP address to estimate location. We don't use it for advertising.
  • Opting out. You can block or delete these cookies in your browser settings, or install Google's Analytics opt-out add-on. When you dismiss the cookie notice, we save that in your browser's local storage (moose-cookie-notice) so it doesn't keep coming back.
  • Amazon affiliate links. Links in the Aurora Shop and some articles are Amazon Associates links. We may earn a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. Once you're on Amazon, Amazon's own privacy notice and cookies apply. We never see your purchase details.
  • Live space-weather bar. Your browser fetches public data directly from NOAA. No personal data is sent beyond a standard web request.
  • Aurora Webcams page. The cameras are YouTube videos, embedded in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com). Watching them loads content from Google under Google's privacy policy.
  • Fonts and images from other servers. The site loads its fonts from Google Fonts, country flags from flagcdn.com and product photos from Amazon's image servers. Like any web request, these see your IP address; we don't send them anything else.

09 Contact

Questions about any of this, or about your data — reach out directly:

Support & privacy questions
Email us