Privacy policy

What we collect, and what we don't.

SolarSystem.city has no accounts, no logins, no advertising, and no analytics. Your walk lives on your own phone. This page explains the handful of places where data does move, why, and how to stop it.

Last updated: 31 July 2026

Who is responsible for your data

SolarSystem.city is operated by Factorem LLC, a New York limited liability company doing business as Nerd-Sniped, at 41 State Street, Suite 112, Albany, NY 12207, USA. Under data protection law, Factorem LLC is the "controller" — the party that decides what data is collected and why. For anything on this page (questions, requests, complaints) write to ryan@nerd-sniped.com.

Under Canadian and Quebec law we're required to name an individual accountable for privacy: that is Ryan Kelly, reachable at the same address.

The short version

• No account, no password, no email required to walk a mission.
• Your mission progress is stored on your device only. We never receive it.
• Your location is used to work out which planet you're standing at. We don't log it, store it, or build a history of where you've been.
• The AR camera view is processed on your device. We don't record, store, or transmit video.
• Fonts are served from our own domain so simply opening a page doesn't announce you to anyone else.
• We have never sold or shared personal information, and we don't run behavioral advertising. There is nothing here to opt out of, because we don't do it.

What's stored on your device

We use your browser's local storage — not cookies — to remember your walk. Under EU and UK ePrivacy rules this is "strictly necessary" storage for a service you explicitly asked for, which is why you aren't being nagged by a consent banner. With one exception, noted in the table below, none of it leaves your phone and we can't read it.

You can erase all of it at any time from the help page, or by clearing site data in your browser. There's no copy anywhere else, so delete with caution — there's no undo.

Location

A solar-system walk is a location experience; without knowing roughly where you are, the site can't tell whether you're standing at Mercury or at Neptune. Your browser will ask permission before sharing location, and you can refuse or revoke it at any time — the site's experience degrades to manual navigation.

Here's exactly what happens to those coordinates:

• Matching you to a planet happens entirely in your browser. Those coordinates are never transmitted.
• Walking directions send your current position and your destination through our server to Google's Routes API to draw the route. We pass it through and hand back the route — we don't store it.
• The mission builder sends the map location you're searching around to Google Places (or to Photon, a keyless OpenStreetMap service, as a fallback) to suggest nearby landmarks. This is the point on the map you're planning at, which may have nothing to do with where you physically are.
• Map imagery is drawn from OpenFreeMap, which serves the map tiles. Unlike the searches above, your browser fetches these directly rather than through our server, so OpenFreeMap sees your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at. It never receives your GPS position — the blue dot is drawn on your device, over tiles that were requested for the area on screen.
• An approximate, city-level guess is used to open the builder map somewhere sensible instead of on a blank globe. It comes from our host, from the connection you've already made to load the page — no separate lookup and no extra company involved. It's a cosmetic starting view, accurate to roughly your city at best.

We do not track your route, keep a location history, or attempt to identify you from where you walk. Precise location counts as sensitive personal data under several of the laws below, and we treat it that way.

Camera

The AR views need camera access to see the printed card and lock the planet to real-world scale. The video is processed live on your device and discarded frame by frame. We don't record it, store it, upload it, or run face detection on it. If you take a photo, it's yours — it stays in your camera roll and never touches our servers.

When you contact us or submit a walk

If you send us a message, we get whatever you put in it — typically your name, email, and whatever you wanted to tell us. We use it to reply. The form is handled by our host rather than a separate form company, so your message doesn't pass through anyone new on its way to us.

If you submit a walk for review through the planner, we receive the walk itself (landmarks, coordinates, your notes) and the contact address you gave us, so we can talk the mission through with you. If your walk is published, we credit you only by a name or handle you've chosen — we never publish your email address. Please don't put personal details about other people into landmark names or notes; that's a public document once it's live.

When you buy a card

Card and postcard orders are handled by Shopify, not by this site.

The shopping cart on this site is Shopify's too. When you add something to it, your browser talks to Shopify directly — so Shopify receives your IP address and what you put in the cart at that moment, before you have decided to buy anything. We do this so your cart survives closing the tab, and so the price and stock you see are the real ones rather than ours.

When you check out you leave this site for Shopify's, and the details you enter there — name, shipping address, email, payment details — go to Shopify and its payment processor under their privacy terms. We never see or store your card number. We receive the order information we need to get a physical package to you, and we use it for that and for order-related messages, not for marketing you didn't ask for.

Shopify's checkout sets its own cookies, which are outside the strictly-necessary storage described above and are governed by Shopify's own consent tooling and policy.

Server logs

Our host, Netlify, records standard web-server logs — IP address, page requested, timestamp, browser type — as an automatic part of serving the site. We use them to keep the site up and stop abuse (our location APIs are rate-limited per IP for this reason). We don't use them to build profiles.

Who else touches your data

These are service providers acting on our instructions, not partners we sell data to. Several are based in the United States, so using this site involves transferring data there; those transfers rely on the standard legal mechanisms for international transfers, including Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where applicable.

Why we're allowed to do this (legal bases)

For visitors in the EU, UK, and other regions with equivalent laws:

• Consent — camera and precise location. Your browser asks first, and you can withdraw at any time in your browser or device settings.
• Contract / performance of a service you requested — storing your walk progress, resolving which planet you're at, giving you directions.
• Legitimate interests — server logs and rate limiting, for keeping the site available and free of abuse; replying to messages you send us.

How long we keep things

• On-device data — until you clear it. We can't see it or delete it for you.
• Server logs — retained by our host on their standard short rolling schedule.
• Messages and walk submissions — kept while we're dealing with them and for a reasonable period after, then deleted. Published walks stay published; the contact details behind them don't.
• Location coordinates — not retained at all.

Children

This site is intended for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and there's no account, profile, upload, or messaging feature through which a child could give us any. Solar-system walks cross real streets and cover real distances — children walking a mission should be accompanied by an adult, and that's a safety point as much as a legal one. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, write to us and we'll delete it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights: to know what we hold about you, to get a copy, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to withdraw consent, to data portability, and to not be subject to automated decision-making (we don't do any). Exercising them costs nothing and we won't treat you differently for it.

In practice, most of what this site knows about you is on your own phone, where you can inspect and erase it yourself without asking us. For anything else, write to the address at the top. We'll respond within the timeframe your law requires — one month under GDPR, 45 days under US state laws.

Region-specific notes:

• EU / UK — we don't currently offer walks or ship cards to the EU or UK, so we haven't appointed a representative there. If you're visiting the site from Europe you're welcome here, the protections on this page still apply to you, and you keep the right to complain to your national data protection authority.
• California — we do not sell or share personal information, and have not in the preceding 12 months. We don't use it for cross-context behavioral advertising or profiling. We honour Global Privacy Control signals; and because we don't track across sites, a Do Not Track signal changes nothing about our behavior, which is already not to track.
• Canada — you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. In Quebec, you additionally have rights of access, correction, portability, and de-indexing, and technology that could locate or identify you (here: location services) is off until you switch it on and can be switched back off at any time.
• Brazil — you have the rights set out in Art. 18 LGPD, including confirmation of processing and anonymisation of unnecessary data.
• Mexico — this page serves as our aviso de privacidad, and you may exercise your ARCO rights (access, rectification, cancellation, opposition) at the contact address above.

Security

The site is served entirely over HTTPS, API keys are held server-side and never sent to your browser, and the smallest reliable amount of data is collected in the first place. No system is perfectly secure, but there's very little here worth stealing. If a breach ever affects your data and poses a real risk to you, we'll notify you and the relevant regulators as required by law.

Changes

If we change how data is handled, we'll update this page and move the date at the top. For anything significant — a new third party, a new category of data — we'll say so prominently on the site rather than quietly editing this page.