Privacy policy

Touchdown tracks one flight so you know when to leave for the airport pickup. It works without an account, and it is built to know as little about you as possible. This page covers the website (tdown.live), the iPhone app and the Android app.

The short version

• No accounts, no sign-up.
• No ads, no data sale, no tracking cookies.
• Your location never reaches our servers.
• Everything we store expires on its own, most of it within hours.

Flight searches

When you look up a flight, the flight number or route is sent to our server to fetch live data. Responses are cached briefly (seconds to minutes) so several people watching the same flight share one data request. Searches are not linked to you.

Your recent searches and tracked flights are stored only on your device, in your browser's local storage. They never leave it.

Flight alerts (optional)

If you turn on alerts for a flight, we store a push token for your device together with the alerts you chose and, for the leave-time alert, your travel time in minutes. That is everything — the token is a delivery address, not an identity.

This data lives only as long as the watched flight: it is deleted within about a day of landing, or within 48 hours if the flight is no longer watched. Turning alerts off removes your token immediately. On Android, the app creates its push token when it starts, but the token stays on your device until you actually enable an alert.

Your location (optional)

The pickup planner can estimate your travel time to the airport. That needs your location, and your browser or phone will ask first.

Your coordinates are never sent to our servers and never stored. On the web, they go directly from your device to the OSRM routing service (project-osrm.org) to compute a driving time. On iOS, routing is done by Apple Maps under Apple's privacy policy. Only the resulting minutes are kept, on your device.

Technical data

Like any website, our servers see your IP address. We use it only for rate limiting (held in memory for about a minute) and it appears in standard Google Cloud request logs. The iPhone app sends anonymous usage events (for example, "a search happened") with no identifiers attached.

Third parties

Touchdown runs on a small set of services:

• Firebase / Google Cloud — hosting, our server functions, short-lived data storage, and push notification delivery.
• Flightradar24 and AeroDataBox — the flight data sources. Our server sends them the flight number being looked up, never anything about you.
• CARTO / OpenStreetMap — the map tiles, loaded by your browser.
• OSRM — driving-time estimates on the web, as described above.
• Aircraft photo hosts — the photo of your plane is loaded by your browser from the photographer's hosting site.

Services your browser talks to directly (maps, routing, photos) see your IP address, as with any web resource.

Retention

• Live flight data cache: seconds to minutes.
• Flight paths for the map: up to a day after the flight.
• Alert subscriptions: until shortly after the flight ends, at most a few days.
• All flight data sourced from our providers: 30 days at most.
• Data on your device (searches, tracked flights, settings): until you clear it.

Your choices

Nothing we store is tied to your identity, so there is no profile to request or export. You can turn alerts off at any time (this deletes your push token), revoke the location and notification permissions in your browser or phone settings, and clear the app's local data like any website data. Questions or a deletion request: redon04@gmail.com.

Children

Touchdown is a general-audience utility. It has no accounts and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If Touchdown starts collecting something new, this page changes first and the date above moves. The current version always lives at tdown.live/privacy.