PLATE SOLVER - PRIVACY POLICY

Last updated: 7 October 2026

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IN SHORT

Plate Solver works on your device. The photo you open is analysed inside your
browser and is never uploaded: there is no account and no server of mine that
receives it. The site counts visits and a few anonymous events with Google
Analytics, so I can see whether the tool is used and where it fails. Those
events never contain your photo, the photo's link, or your location.

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WHAT THIS COVERS

The Plate Solver web app at alokm.com/solve, published by Alok Mandavgane.

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YOUR PHOTO

  - A photo you open from your device is read by your browser and processed in
    your browser. It is not sent anywhere.
  - A photo you open from a link is fetched by your browser straight from the
    website that hosts it (Flickr, Dropbox and so on). That website sees the
    request, as it would if you opened the photo directly; this site does not.
  - Exported images are made in your browser and saved to your device. They
    carry a small credit and descriptive metadata (camera settings, the sky
    position, constellation names). The photo's GPS location is never copied
    into them.

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SHARE LINKS

A share link carries the photo's web address, the solution (how the photo maps
onto the sky) and, only if you tick the boxes, the capture time and a location
rounded to about 10 km. All of it sits after the "#" in the link, which
browsers do not send to any server, including this one. Anyone you give the
link to can see what it contains.

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WHAT YOUR BROWSER KEEPS

  - Your display preferences (layers, label size) and the last location you
    typed, in the browser's local storage.
  - A copy of the app and its star catalogue, so it loads instantly next time
    and works offline.

Clearing this site's data in your browser removes all of it.

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ANALYTICS

The site uses Google Analytics 4, as the rest of alokm.com does. Besides page
visits (which record the page's address without anything after "#"), it
receives these events:

  - a solve started, succeeded or failed: whether the photo came from a file or
    a link, the hosting website's name (e.g. live.staticflickr.com), the kind of
    lens and field of view found, how long it took, the photo's pixel size, and
    a failure category;
  - an image exported, a share link copied, or a time and place applied.

Google sets its usual analytics cookies and processes the visit under its own
policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy). You can block Google Analytics
with a browser setting or extension and the tool works exactly the same.

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CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

If the app starts doing something this policy does not describe, the policy
gets updated first, and the date at the top changes with it.

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CONTACT

Alok Mandavgane
alok@alokm.com