About OurAirports

Privacy Policy

OurAirports does not treat your personal information as a commodity: that means that we don't buy it, sell it, or use it to spam you. Still, privacy on the modern web is a tricky thing, and there are some points that you should be aware of:

• OurAirports is a public site, and by "public", we mean PUBLIC. All content you explicitly submit to OurAirports through forms aside from your password, email address, and searches is released into Public Domain and can be viewed by anyone on the web, including search engines.

  That means that your user name, description of yourself, and profile (Twitter/LinkedIn/etc. public URL), the airports you've flagged as visited, every comment you leave, every correction you make to airport data, and your home airport (if you name it) are out there, on the web. This is an open-data web site, after all, and we don't believe that "open" means "we can benefit from it, but we'll hide it from everyone else".

• Like nearly every site on the web, we log network activity. That means that we know the Internet address that you connected from and, most of the time, the URL of the web page that referred you to us. If you're logged in, we also have your login name and any information associated with it.

  We don't do anything evil with all that network-level information (in fact, we don't do anything good either, because this is a volunteer site, and no one has time to look at server logs).

  Your Internet service provider can see that you're connecting to OurAirports, as can anyone else on the same WiFi network (which matters especially with an open access point like at an airport or coffee shop; however, since OurAirports uses secure SSL/TLS encrypted connections, they won't be able to see what airports you're looking at, or know anything else except that you're connecting. If you don't want intermediaries to have access to that information (e.g. if you're trying to get your family out of a dangerous country and looking for the best exit airport), you can connect to all web sites via a trusted Virtual Private Network (VPN), which will hide your web activity from anyone trying to snoop on it.

• If (and only if) you authorise it, OurAirports uses the W3C Geolocation API to obtain your current location from your web browser and prefill the latitude and longitude into the OurAirports search box.

  We can't get your location information unless you tell your browser/smartphone that we're allowed to, and even then, we use it only when you explicitly click on a link (not every time you visit a page on the site). The information goes back to us as a search request that indistinguishable from if you typed the latitude and longitude manually. We do not store your location in any way, except as it might appear in search requests, and we don't know if the search requests are your current location, or just a location you're interested in. See below, however, for other possible privacy issues outside our control.

• For the maps in OurAirports, OpenStreetMap provides the vector-map tiles and ESRI provides the satellite-view tiles. Since your computer or mobile device requests the tiles directly from their servers, they will have a record of your activity, associated with your IP address.

  On specific pages (not the main airport landing pages), OurAirports embeds web content from other sites. We use content from Dark Sky on the airport weather pages, and content from Avionio on the airport arrivals/departures pages. If you visit one of those subpages, those sites will be able to collect information directly from your browser when it displays the nested content (outside the control of OurAirports, since your browser loads the embedded content directly from the sites).

• To protect your online privacy, OurAirports no longer uses Google Analytics or Google AdSense program.

Credits

This site was created by David Megginson, a private pilot and frequent airline passenger. When he has time, David blogs about flying in Land and Hold Short, and about IT matters in Quoderat.

Of course, this site takes advantage of many other people's work. Special thanks to ...

• the U.S. government for providing free airport and aviation weather data through the FAA and the now-discontinued (and much-missed) DAFIF;

• the Leaflet developers for creating a high-quality, open-source mapping library, and OpenStreetMap and Esri for providing free map tiles;

• George Plews for maintaining an up-to-date data list of all Canadian airports and seaplane bases;

• Marc Wick at Geonames for permission to run thousands of batch queries against his geolocation APIs;

• all the contributors who have supplied airport data to Paul Tomblin's navaid.com site;

• all the contributors who have supplied airport data to the SoaringWeb.org and Great Circle Mapper sites;

• the list of North Korean airports at the FAS report;

• Raul Robledo, for information on thousands of Brazilian airports.

• the Kwik Navigation Flight Planner site, which contains information about hundreds of Australian airports;

• the many authors of Wikipedia for creating and maintaining so many useful geographical and aeronautical lists;

• Avionio for offering embeddable arrival and departure information for airports.

• forecast.io for offering embeddable weather forecasts based on latitude and longitude.

• The Leaflet developers for creating a high-quality, open-source mapping library, and OpenStreetMap and Esri for providing free map tiles.

• the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for making OurAirports data part of their humanitarian crisis data service;

• my spouse, Bonnie, who has helped with OurAirports despite the demands of many of her own projects; and

• all the passengers and pilots who have sent airport data, corrections, and comments to OurAirports, especially our top contributors, who volunteer many hours of their time every month keeping constantly-changing airport information up to date.