Last updated: 22 October 2026
Data policy
One page, in plain words, for anyone deciding whether to point a receiver at AvioADSB. The privacy policy covers your account data under the GDPR, and the terms are the binding text.
1. What we collect
| From your station | Why |
|---|---|
| The ADS-B and Mode S messages your decoder forwards: aircraft address, callsign, position, altitude, speed, squawk | Merged with every other station into the live picture. Aircraft data is held in memory for about a minute and is not archived. |
| Your station's UUID (readsb / ultrafeeder) or feed token (feeder script) | Tells your station's data apart from everyone else's. The UUID is also how you claim the station. |
| The public IP address your feed connects from | Abuse checks (for example, one connection posing as many stations), the "am I feeding?" check, and a rough location estimate if you haven't given one. Cleared once your station hasn't connected for 90 days. |
| Your station's precise location and antenna height, only if you enter them | Checks that the positions you report are physically receivable from where you are, and draws your range plot. See section 4. |
| Daily per-station totals: messages, distinct aircraft, maximum range per compass sector | Your "My station" page and the station ranking. |
| Which H3 cells (~12,000 km² each) your station heard aircraft in over the last 24 hours | The coverage map, which shows how many stations hear each cell, never which ones. Nothing about the aircraft is kept, and older cells are deleted. |
An account (email, username, password hash) is optional. It's needed only for an API key. We never see your receiver's local network, its other feeds, or anything beyond what the connector sends.
2. What stays free
- The live map at /live, for everyone.
- The API, with no key: 1 request every 10 seconds and 100 a day per network.
- The contributor tier for feeders: 10,000 requests a month at 1 request/second, point queries up to 250 nm and the global snapshot, for as long as one of your stations has fed in the last 7 days.
- All of it under CC BY-NC 4.0 for personal projects, education and research.
There is no paid tier that takes any of this away. Feeding stays free, and so does reading the data back for non-commercial use.
3. What is sold commercially
Companies that want to use the data in a product sign a commercial licence with us. What a licence covers:
- The merged aircraft feed, the same aggregate picture the API serves, combined from every station. Today that is live data only. We don't keep an aircraft history; if we ever do, the same limits apply.
What we never sell, license or hand over commercially:
- Station locations, precise or approximate
- Who feeds: names, emails, usernames, UUIDs, tokens or IP addresses
- Any one station's own stream, or data labelled with the station it came from
- Per-station statistics
The income pays for the servers and for sponsored receivers in places with no coverage (see coverage).
4. How station locations are protected
- A precise location is optional. Without one, we estimate a rough position from your IP, which is only ever shown rounded.
- If you give one, it never leaves the server. It's used only inside the ingest process to check positions against your radio horizon. No API, page or export returns it, including to you. That guarantee is enforced by an automated test in our build, not only by this text.
- Public maps are coarse. The receiver map rounds positions to a ~28 km grid. The coverage map shows where aircraft are heard, not where stations are, in H3 cells of about 12,000 km², with a count of stations per cell.
- Live aircraft are never tagged with the station that heard them. The station id is stripped from every map and API response, so traffic can't be used to triangulate you.
- Range plots show distance, not place. Your "My station" page draws how far you hear in each direction, centred on nothing. There's no basemap and no coordinates behind it.
- Deleting is real. Deleting a station or your account removes its location and statistics. Unclaimed stations can be deleted on request.
5. What feeders get back
- An API key at the contributor tier: 10,000 requests a month at 1 per second, instead of 100 a day at one every 10 seconds, plus the global snapshot.
- A "My station" page: messages per second, aircraft per day, a range plot and your rank among stations, with a share link you can turn off at any time.
- The live map, with the whole network's traffic, not only your own.
- MLAT: if you run mlat-client, positions of aircraft without ADS-B are computed from your timing together with other stations' timing, and shown on the live map.
6. Stopping
Remove the connector line and your station goes offline; nothing else is needed. Claimed stations can be deleted from the dashboard. To have an unclaimed station removed, or for anything else, contact us.