Privacy Policy

This policy covers the Chasing Perspectives website and the Chasing Light app, both operated by Josh Beames in Australia.

The short version: we do not sell your data, we do not track you across other apps or websites, and there is no advertising or analytics SDK anywhere in the app. The website keeps its own visitor counts, with no third party involved, and we explain exactly how below. Everything else here explains what we do collect and why.

Last updated: 21 October 2026.

1. What we collect

Your account

• Your name, email address and password when you create an account. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and stored hashed. We never see them.
• If you choose to sign in with Apple or with Google instead of a password, that provider confirms who you are and tells us your name and an email address. They know you signed in to Chasing Light. Apple's Hide My Email gives us a forwarding address rather than your real one, and the app works normally either way.
• Anything you choose to add to your profile: a handle, a profile photo, a short bio, your general location and your camera gear. All of these are optional.

Your location

• If you allow it, your device location, so the forecast centres on where you actually are. The aurora, cloud, golden hour and storm forecasts are all location specific, and without a location they cannot tell you anything useful.
• To fetch a forecast, the coordinates of the spot are sent to the forecast providers listed in section 3. Most of those requests go through our own server first, which keeps a shared copy of each forecast so that people in the same area can share one request. That copy holds the spot that was forecast, but nothing about who asked for it. The providers receive a location, not your identity.
• Apart from that shared copy, and anything you type in yourself, these are the only times the app stores where you are, or the name of the place, on our server.
• Chases. When you start a chase, we keep a start point with it so we can check the sky you were under when you go to mint it. It is wherever the app is set at that moment: your current location if you have allowed it, otherwise your saved home spot or a place you picked. No other member ever sees it, whatever your settings.
• That start point is rounded before it is kept, to the nearest point on a grid 0.02 degrees apart, which is about 2 km. Across Australia each square is about 2.2 km north to south and 1.6 to 2.2 km east to west, so the point we keep can be up to about 1.5 km from where you were. Our database does the rounding itself, so an exact position cannot be stored even by an older version of the app.
• What other members can see is the area you choose for a chase, such as a town or a headland. It starts as the general location on your profile, and you can change it each time. Turn on Hide where I am, or make your account private, and that area is hidden from everyone else on every chase. Hide where I am does not stop the rounded start point being kept, because that is what checks the chase.
• Storm alerts. If you switch them on, we keep your saved home spot and its name on our server, because the alert is worked out while the app is closed. The database rounds it to the same 2 km grid before it is saved, so an exact coordinate cannot be written even by mistake. That is accurate enough to tell you lightning is close, and not accurate enough to say which house you are in. Turn storm alerts off and it is deleted. Aurora alerts need no location at all, because they go off the planet-wide Kp number.
• Golden hour, sunrise, night sky and storm forecast alerts. Your phone works out the forecast for your saved home spot itself and sends us the score, when to send the alert and the name of the place, but no coordinates.
• The dark sky alert. When it tells you that you are under a truly dark sky, we note the area, rounded to about 10 km, and its name, so you are never told about the same place twice.
• Your Shot List. If you are signed in, the spots and plans you save are backed up to your account at the exact spot you saved them, so they are not lost if you change phones. Only you can see them.
• The app never tracks your location in the background. iOS only lets it read your location while it is open. If you add a Chasing Light widget, or use the Apple Watch app or its complications, they check your location when they refresh so they can show the forecast for where you are. That location goes to the forecast providers to fetch the forecast, and we do not keep it.
• You can refuse location access and still use the app by choosing a place manually. You can change this at any time in iOS Settings.

Your device

• If you turn on notifications, we store the push token Apple issues for that device, along with the platform and app version, so we can send the alerts you asked for. It identifies a device, not a person, and it is deleted when you sign out or turn notifications off.
• AR Mode reads the phone's motion sensors so the sky lines up with where you are pointing. That is used live on screen and never leaves the device.

What you post

• Photos you upload, along with your captions, comments, likes, follows and the shooting sessions you check into.
• Photos are put through automated moderation before they appear, to keep the community clean. See section 3.

Purchases and bookings

• If you book a workshop or buy a product, we keep your booking details and a record of the payment. Card details are entered on our payment provider's own checkout and never reach our servers.
• A Chaser Pro subscription bought inside the app is a purchase from Apple, not from us. Apple takes the payment, and we are told only that the subscription is active and when it runs out. Manage or cancel it in your Apple account, and we never see the card.

Your visit to the website

The website counts its own visitors. It is our own script talking to our own server, and nothing about your visit goes to Google, Meta or any other company. We record which pages are opened, which workshop or guide a page is about, what is typed into the site search and which result is chosen, a tap on a Reserve button, roughly how long a page was open and how far it was read, the page that sent you here, the time zone your device reports (such as Australia/Melbourne, which tells us your country and roughly which part of the world you are in, without using your IP address) and whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer. Your IP address is never stored with your visit.

By default this is not about you. An anonymous visitor gets a random visitor id that is thrown away and made afresh every day, so your visits on different days cannot be joined up. Your visit is tied to you in only two cases: when you are signed in to your account, or when you arrived from a link in one of our own emails. In those cases we keep a short picture of your interests, meaning which workshops and guides you have looked at, searched for, waited for, kept on your bucket list or booked, so that the upcoming-workshops sections of our emails and pages can put the ones you care about first. That is the only thing it is used for. It is not shared, and it is not used for advertising anywhere.

If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, your visit is counted for the day and never tied to you, and nothing is remembered on your device.

How we measure the app

To understand how Chasing Light is used, we count what members do in it (for example how many people open it each day and month, how many come back, features used, checkouts finished and money taken) and look only at the totals. To count the people who open the app, we keep one note for each day a signed-in member opens it: which account, which day, and whether they had Chaser Pro that day. It holds no time, place, device or IP address. Each note is deleted after 35 days, or straight away if you delete your account, and after that only the totals remain. Only authorised administrators can see the totals, inside our own admin app. Any figure that would describe fewer than five people is withheld. We never use your health information, messages or location for this, and no third-party analytics service is involved.

What we do not collect

• No advertising identifier, no IDFA, no cross app or cross site tracking. The app does not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission because it has nothing to ask for.
• No analytics or crash reporting SDK in the app, and no behavioural profiling beyond the website interest picture described above, which exists only for people who are signed in or came from our email.
• No access to your photo library beyond the individual images you pick to upload. The picker runs outside the app and hands us only your chosen file.
• No microphone or contacts access. The camera is used only for AR Mode, live on screen, and those frames are never recorded, stored or transmitted.

2. Why we collect it

• To run the app. Forecasts need a location. An account needs an email. A community post needs a photo and an author.
• To deliver what you bought. Bookings, course access, workshop logistics and receipts.
• To send you what you asked for. Aurora and sunset alerts you switch on yourself, workshop emails for trips you booked, and newsletters you opted into. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link.
• To keep the community safe. Automated image moderation and the ability to act on reports.

We do not use your data to build an advertising profile, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

3. Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers to run the website and the app. This is the complete list. Each one receives only what it needs to do its job.

• Supabase hosts our database, accounts and file storage. Your account and community content live here.
• Cloudflare serves the website. Like any web host it sees the IP address and page of every request made to us.
• Stripe processes payments. Stripe receives your payment details directly. We receive only the result and the last four digits.
• Resend sends our transactional and marketing email, so it receives your email address and name.
• Open-Meteo and Xweather provide weather, cloud, radar and lightning data. They receive the coordinates being forecast, not your identity.
• MET Norway, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, provides moonrise and moonset times on the Apple Watch app. It receives the coordinates being forecast, not your identity.
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center and NASA provide the solar, geomagnetic and satellite imagery. No personal data is sent.
• OpenAI runs the automated image moderation check. An uploaded image is sent for classification before it is published.
• Apple provides the maps used in parts of the app, turns a coordinate into the name of the nearest place, looks up an address when you type one, delivers push notifications, and distributes the app itself. If you subscribe inside the app, Apple also takes the payment and tells us only whether the subscription is active.
• OpenFreeMap serves the map tiles behind the storm map, built from OpenStreetMap data. Like any map on the internet, the tile server receives your IP address and the area of the map you are looking at. OpenStreetMap itself receives nothing from you.
• cdnjs and unpkg serve two open source drawing libraries used by the app's 3D and map screens, and receive an IP address when they load.
• Xero is connected for accounting and receives booking and payment records once it is switched on.

We host our own fonts rather than loading them from a font service, so no third party is contacted simply because you opened a page.

Some of these providers are outside Australia, so your information may be stored or processed overseas. We only use providers that commit to appropriate protection for that data.

We will also disclose information if the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety or our legal rights.

4. What is public

Your name, handle, profile photo, bio, level, the general location on your profile and anything you post to the community are visible to other members.

When you are out on a chase, other signed-in members can see that you are out, what you are chasing, the note and photos you add to it, and the area you chose, unless you hide it (see section 1). They see it while you are out and for 24 hours after you finish, then it drops out of their view. Delete it from your chases list and it goes from their view straight away. Nobody who is signed out can see it.

Hide where I am also hides the location on your profile. If you set your account to private, your photos and social links are hidden from members who do not follow you, the photos from your chases go only to your followers, and where you are is hidden from everyone, followers included. Your email address is never shown to other members.

5. How long we keep it

• Your account and community content: until you delete it or close your account.
• Chases: for as long as you have an account, with the start point rounded as described in section 1. Nothing deletes them automatically. Tap Remove on a session in Activity, while it is live or within a day of it ending, and it is deleted from our server. Deleting a chase from your chases list only hides it, and the record stays with your account. Ask us and we will delete any of them for you.
• Your Shot List backup: until you close your account. Deleting a spot in the app does not remove its backup yet, so ask us if you want one gone.
• Booking, payment and tax records: seven years. Australian tax law requires it, so these survive account deletion, but they are stripped of your name and contact details first. See section 6.
• Marketing email lists: until you unsubscribe. An unsubscribe record itself is kept, because it is the only way to be sure we do not email you again by mistake.
• Enquiries: twelve months after we have answered them. One we have not answered yet stays until we do.
• Waitlist entries: twelve months after a place was offered or the entry was closed. While you are still waiting, it stays.
• Email and notification delivery logs: your address and the subject line are removed after 90 days, and the log entry itself after twelve months. We keep a copy of each trip email we send you; the body of it is cleared after 90 days.
• An unfinished checkout: 90 days.
• Push notification registrations: removed after a year without the app being opened on that device, and created again the next time it is.
• Daily app-open notes: 35 days, then deleted. They are used only to count active members, and after that only the totals remain, with no account attached. Deleting your account deletes them straight away.
• These deletions run automatically every night. If you would like something removed sooner, ask.
• Website visit records are kept for 180 days, then deleted. Daily totals (how many visitors, which pages) are kept without any visitor ids. Your interest picture is rebuilt each night from the last 180 days and from your own bookings and bucket list, and is deleted with your account.

6. Your choices and your rights

• Access and correction. You can see and edit your profile in the app at any time, and you can ask us for a copy of what we hold.
• Deletion. You can delete your account yourself, in the app, under Profile. It removes your profile, posts, comments, photos, chases, saved places, alerts, device registrations, any unfinished checkout, and your address from our delivery logs. Purchase and booking records stay for the seven years tax law requires, but your name, email and phone number are removed from them first, so what is left cannot be traced back to you. You can also email us instead if you would rather we did it.
• Location. Grant or revoke it in iOS Settings. The app works without it.
• Notifications. Every alert is opt in, and can be switched off in the app or in iOS Settings.
• Marketing. Unsubscribe from any email, or ask us to remove you.
• You can ask us to delete the website visit records tied to your account or email at any time, and to stop tying visits to you at all. Turning on Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track in your browser does the second one by itself.

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you also have the right to object to processing, to request portability, and to complain to your local data protection authority. In Australia you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

7. Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Every table in our database enforces row level security, which means the rules about who can see what are applied by the database itself rather than by the app asking nicely. In practice: you can only ever write your own records, and you can only read your own account, your own bookings, your own purchases and your own course progress. Community posts, and the chases other members can see for a day, are the deliberate exception, because a feed nobody else can read is not a community.

We keep administrative access to a minimum and we never store card numbers. The only positions we keep are the ones described in section 1, and the only exact ones tied to your account are the spots you choose to save. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell affected users promptly if a breach ever puts their data at risk.

8. Children

Chasing Light is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 to create an account or make a purchase. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

9. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page, and for significant changes we will tell you in the app or by email.

Contact Us

For any privacy question, or to request access or deletion, contact us at hello@chasingperspectives.com.