Privacy

Quartet is an independent project. It collects the minimum needed to sign you in and run your searches. It does not sell your data and does not use third-party advertising or analytics trackers.

What is collected

• Your email address — used only to send sign-in links and to associate your saved work with your account.
• The work you create — the areas, searches, tasks, and notes you make, so they can be stored and shown back to you.
• A session cookie — a single first-party cookie that keeps you signed in. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
• Feedback you send — if you use the Feedback button, the message you write is stored along with your email address (and the task it was sent from, if any) so it can be read and acted on. Feedback is kept separately from your tasks, so deleting a task does not remove feedback you sent about it.
• Basic server logs — standard request metadata (such as IP address and timestamps) kept for security, service analytics, and to operate the service.

How it is used

Your information is used to provide the service: to authenticate you, run and store your searches, and keep the site secure and working. It is not used for advertising and is not sold or rented.

Third parties

Some parts of the map are fetched by your browser directly from other providers. Those providers therefore see your IP address and what you asked for, the same as if you had visited them yourself:

• OpenFreeMap — street and minimal basemap vector tiles, map styles, fonts and icons (tiles.openfreemap.org, served through Cloudflare).
• EOX — the Sentinel-2 cloudless satellite basemap (tiles.maps.eox.at).
• unpkg — the Leaflet and MapLibre GL mapping libraries (unpkg.com).
• Google Fonts — web fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com).

Others are contacted by Quartet's server rather than by your browser, so they do not see your IP address. What each one receives differs:

• Photon (photon.komoot.io), an OpenStreetMap-based geocoder — receives the place-name text you type into search.
• Gmail — receives your email address, in order to deliver sign-in links and task-completion notices.
• ESA / Copernicus Data Space (catalogue.dataspace.copernicus.eu, identity.dataspace.copernicus.eu, zipper.dataspace.copernicus.eu, and the public Sentinel-2 mirror on Amazon S3 sentinel-cogs.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com) — receives the map area and dates you search, to find and read matching Sentinel-2 scenes.
• Element 84 (earth-search.aws.element84.com) — receives the map area and dates you search. It is a second catalog of the same public Sentinel-2 imagery.
• Microsoft Planetary Computer (planetarycomputer.microsoft.com) — receives the map area and dates you search, as a third catalog of the same public imagery.
• GitHub (github.com, raw.githubusercontent.com) — receives the date of a search when ADS-B matching is on, because the adsb.lol flight-track archives are published there as dated releases.

The three imagery catalogs are queried because no single one is complete; Quartet reads whichever holds the scene. None of them receive your identity — only the area and dates.

Satellite imagery itself is fetched by Quartet's server and re-served to your browser as map tiles from this site, so the imagery providers never see your IP address or which areas you are looking at.

Hosting is Amazon Web Services (US region). Quartet does not share your account information with any of these providers for their own purposes, and none of them are advertising or analytics services.

Aircraft identity shown on the map

When you match detections against ADS-B, Quartet displays and can export aircraft identity — callsign and ICAO 24-bit address (broadcast by the aircraft itself, via adsb.lol), and registration (tail number) and type (from the Mictronics open aircraft database). This is public data, but in some jurisdictions a registration can identify an aircraft's owner or operator as a natural person.

If your aircraft appears and you want it excluded, or you have a question about how its identity is shown, email support@quartetsearch.com with the registration or ICAO address and it will be handled. Quartet does not build profiles of aircraft owners, and it does not enrich this data with anything beyond the public sources named above.

Retention and your choices

You can delete any task or saved area at any time from the My Tasks page. Sign-in links are short-lived. To have your account and associated data removed, or to make any other data-subject request (access, correction, or deletion), email the address below and it will be handled.

Contact

Questions about privacy or a data request? Email support@quartetsearch.com, or see the contact page.

Quartet is provided as-is as a personal project. This note may be updated as the service changes.