The short version: no accounts, no ads, no cookies, and no outside analytics companies. Your location is only used to get your forecast, alerts keep the bare minimum needed to send them, and visits are counted anonymously.
When you tap the location button, your phone asks your permission and then works out where you are. You can always type a place in instead.
To score the sunset, the app sends the place’s coordinates (and a few points along the direction of the sun, up to 200 km away) to:
Like any website, these services also see your internet address when your phone contacts them. Afterglow doesn’t send them anything else about you.
The app remembers your last place, your settings, and recent forecasts and landscape shapes in your browser’s storage on your phone, so it opens quickly and works offline. None of this is sent to Afterglow. Clearing the site’s data in your browser removes it.
Only if you turn alerts on, the Afterglow server stores:
That’s used for one thing: checking the forecast for your place and sending you alerts. It isn’t shared or sold.
Deleting it: tap Turn off in the alerts card and it’s deleted from the server straight away. If you instead block notifications or uninstall the app, it’s deleted the next time an alert can’t be delivered.
Like most websites, the server keeps standard access logs (internet address, time, and the page or file requested), used only for security and fixing problems, and deleted after 14 days. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which also sees your internet address.
Afterglow counts visits so I can see how many people use it and how they found it, for example a link on Reddit. Each time the app opens it sends a tiny note to the Afterglow server: where the link came from, the kind of device (Android, iPhone or computer), and whether the app is installed. It also counts a few actions, like turning alerts on or installing the app.
It never sends your location, the places you look at, your name or anything else about you. There are no cookies, nothing is saved on your phone for this, and no outside analytics company is involved. To count each visitor once a day, your internet address is mixed with a secret code that changes every day; the address itself isn’t kept, and the code is thrown away the next day. What’s kept is just daily totals.
Afterglow is a small personal project by Jeremy Tucker Photography. If you have a question or want something removed, get in touch through the About page.