Feeder privacy & data licence
What we store about a receiver that feeds us, what we publish, what we
never publish, and how to leave. If something here is vague, that is a
bug — write to us and we will fix the wording.
Last updated: 1 September 2026 · applies to feed.skydex.online:30004
1. The deal, in one paragraph
You point your ADS-B receiver at us with one line of config. It is free,
voluntary, non-exclusive and revocable: keep feeding every other network
you already feed, and remove the line whenever you like — no questions, no
notice period. In exchange your data powers a flight game and the public
pages around it, and your station gets a page, statistics and perks.
2. What we receive
A Beast-format stream of ADS-B messages your receiver decoded from the
open air, plus the metadata that comes with any TCP connection:
- Aircraft data — position, altitude, callsign and the rest of what an aircraft transmits publicly.
- Your feeder UUID, if you set one. Without it your stream is anonymous and cannot be credited to you.
- Your IP address, because a TCP connection has one. See §5.
- Antenna coordinates, only if you enter them yourself when registering a receiver. They are optional and used for coverage maths.
We never receive or ask for anything about the machine your receiver runs
on: no hardware IDs, no system inventory, no telemetry beyond the feed.
3. What we publish
| Published | Never published |
|---|
|
Station name (the one you type), country, online/quiet status,
day streak, 30-day uptime, per-day aircraft and message counts,
the rarest aircraft your station heard, and a 📡 badge on your
Skydex profile.
|
Your receiver's exact coordinates, your UUID, your IP address, your
e-mail. Coverage maps use rounded positions only. Aircraft heard
per receiver are not exposed publicly, because that set localises an
antenna to within kilometres.
|
A station page becomes eligible for search-engine indexing only after it
has been feeding for at least seven days. Until then it exists, but is
marked noindex.
4. The licence you grant
-
You grant Skydex a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right
to use the data your receiver sends in Skydex products — the game, its
public pages and its API.
-
Non-exclusive means exactly that: the same stream can go to
adsb.lol, airplanes.live, adsb.fi, ADSBExchange, or anywhere else, at
the same time. We encourage it.
-
We do not resell your raw feed. It powers the game and the
public network pages, full stop. If that ever changes we will say so
here first, with a date, and feeding remains revocable at any moment.
-
Revocable. Delete the config line and the data stops. Remove the
receiver on your feed page and
the registration goes with it.
5. Your IP address
Two places touch it, both narrowly:
-
The ingest connection. The aggregator process knows the address of
every connected client, the same way any TCP server does. That list is
not reachable from the public internet — we closed it
deliberately, because each row pairs an address with a station UUID.
-
The "am I feeding you?" check. The page at
skydex.online/feed answers
whether a stream is arriving from the address your browser is using.
The comparison happens in memory and the answer is thrown away —
we do not store the address of anyone who asks. IPv4 is compared
exactly, IPv6 by network prefix; different families answer
"couldn't check", not "no".
An address is not proof of ownership. Behind carrier-grade NAT or a
shared office connection, several people share one address. That is why a
matching address never claims a station automatically — the only way to
claim one is to issue a UUID in your own account.
6. Accounts, retention, deletion
- Feeding needs no account. An anonymous stream is welcome; it just cannot be credited, ranked or badged.
- An account stores what you typed: e-mail, station name, optional antenna coordinates, and the UUIDs you issued (up to five).
- E-mail about your own receivers only: a receiver that has been silent for a week, then for a month, and a receiver that never sent a packet a day after registration — at most three messages per outage, none for marketing. Every message carries a one-click unsubscribe, and the same switch is on your feed page. We send through Postmark (postmarkapp.com) with open and click tracking switched off, and share nothing with them but your address and the message.
- Per-day station counters are kept for the life of the station — they are what the streak and uptime are made of. Raw sightings roll off automatically after 24 hours.
- Deletion: remove the receiver on your feed page, or write to us and we will delete the account and its stations. Aircraft observations already merged into the shared network history are anonymous by then and are not per-person data.
7. Legality of reception
ADS-B is an unencrypted broadcast that aircraft transmit deliberately.
Receiving it is legal in the EU, the US and most of the world, but the
rules are national and you are responsible for yours. We only aggregate
what you chose to send us.
8. Contact
feedback@skydex.online for
anything about your data, or the
#feeders channel on Discord for
everything else. Please never post a UUID in a public channel — it is the
only claim code for a station.