Privacy.

Effective 2026-06-03 · Overhead for macOS

Overhead watches the sky and only the sky. What follows is the whole story: every host the app talks to, what's stored, and where.

Where your data goes

For aircraft data, your Mac talks to our server and nothing else. Everything, the planes near you and their routes alike, goes through our own privacy proxy, so no aircraft service ever sees your address. The only other connection is a one-time satellite download.

api.overheadsky.com

Receives an approximate location (snapped to a ~1 km grid) and a search radius, plus the callsign of a flight already on your screen when it looks up that flight's route. The connection carries your IP, the way any web request does. The proxy doesn't log or retain it.

Our own privacy proxy. It fetches the aircraft near you from ADS-B Exchange and resolves routes from a public aviation dataset, handing back only the result, so the upstream services see the proxy's address, never yours. We coarsen your coordinate before it leaves the app, and the proxy caches an area's traffic briefly, never who asked for it.

celestrak.org

A one-shot orbital-data download.

Powers ISS pass predictions. No identifying information sent.

Your sky log

Overhead keeps a small log of aircraft it has seen, locally at ~/Library/Application Support/Overhead/sky-log.jsonl. It powers the small italic again tag for aircraft you've watched before, the Logbook, and Year in Review. The log stays on your Mac.

Settings → General lets you choose how long to keep it (7 days, 30 days, 1 year, forever), reveal it in Finder, and wipe it whenever you want. Wiping erases sightings, engagements, and rare-aircraft events on this machine. It does not affect your settings or your home address.

Your location

Overhead asks for your location once, during onboarding, so it can show aircraft near where you are. Your exact coordinates stay on your Mac. Only the kilometer-grid version is sent, and only to our privacy proxy. If you'd rather type your address than grant Location Services, that works too, and stays just as local.

Your subscription

Overhead is a subscription, handled entirely by Apple. Your payment details and Apple ID stay with Apple; we never see them, and there's no Overhead account to create or password to keep.

The shape of the app

Overhead runs on your Mac. Apple's frameworks plus our own code are the entire dependency graph, so every byte the app handles is accounted for above. The only diagnostics that exist are the ones you create yourself with Export diagnostics in Settings; the file lands on disk and waits for you to send it.

Notifications use Apple's standard system. Notification content is rendered locally.

Overhead never accepts inbound network connections.

Apple App Privacy

Overhead's App Store privacy label reflects the same posture: nothing is linked to you, and nothing is used to track you. Coarse Location is listed under “Data Not Linked to You · App Functionality”: the ~1 km grid coordinate passes through our proxy only to fetch the aircraft near you, and is never tied to an identity or retained.

Changes

If a future version of Overhead changes what it sends or stores (for example, an opt-in cloud-sync feature), this page is updated and the change is mentioned in release notes before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions: hello@overheadsky.com