Privacy.

Effective 2026-06-03 · Overhead Sky 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

Overhead talks to three places, and the only thing about you that ever leaves your Mac is an approximate location, snapped to a ~1 km grid square. Your precise location never leaves the device.

api.adsb.lol

Receives the ~1 km grid square and a search radius, to return the aircraft nearby. The request carries your IP, the way any web request does.

adsb.lol is a volunteer, community-run open-data project, not an advertiser or data broker. Its aircraft data is openly licensed (ODbL), which is why Overhead can use it. We coarsen your coordinate before it leaves the app, so adsb.lol sees a neighborhood-sized square, never where you actually are.

api.overheadsky.com

The callsign of a flight already on your screen, when it looks up that flight's route. No location.

Our own server. It resolves routes from a public aviation dataset and hands back only the result. It doesn't log or retain your requests.

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 ever sent. If you'd rather type your address than grant Location Services, that works too, and stays just as local.

Your purchase

On the Mac App Store, purchases and subscriptions are 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.

If you buy Overhead for Windows directly from us, payment is processed by Stripe — your card details go to Stripe and never touch our servers. We keep only what's needed to issue and validate your license key: your purchase email, an order identifier, and a timestamp. Your license activates against our licensing service so it can run offline afterward; that service sees only your license key, not your identity.

The launch list

If you leave your email on overheadsky.com to hear when Overhead ships, we store that address with the moment you signed up and the IP address the signup came from (our only guard against abuse of the form). It's used only to send you launch news and the occasional big update, and it stays with us. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes your address. You can also ask us to delete it any time at help@overheadsky.com.

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 is used 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

Overhead Sky is made by Hangar Labs LLC. Questions or data requests: help@overheadsky.com. See also our Terms of Service.