Rotorcast privacy policy

1. Who we are

Rotorcast is made by Mirentha Ltd (“Mirentha”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in England and Wales (company number 17207914) with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. You can contact us about privacy at [email protected].

This policy covers the Rotorcast app for iPhone and its widgets. Visits to mirentha.com are covered by our website privacy policy.

2. What Mirentha receives

Nothing from the app. Rotorcast doesn’t send anything to Mirentha: there’s no account to make, no server of ours for it to talk to, and no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising code built into it.

The app does send some data to Apple, as section 4 describes: a spot’s coordinates to fetch its forecast, and your searches, map taps or location when you add a spot. It sends them only to give you the forecast or the place you’ve asked for, and it downloads NOAA’s Kp forecast, a request that carries nothing from the app beyond what any web request carries, such as your internet address. To the extent Mirentha is responsible for these transmissions to Apple and NOAA under UK data protection law, the lawful basis is that they’re needed to provide the service you’ve requested (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).

If you write to us for support with the form on the Rotorcast support page, we use your message only to answer you, as our website privacy policy describes.

3. What Rotorcast keeps on your iPhone

Rotorcast stores these things on your iPhone so that it works, including offline. Apart from the settings and the rating prompt’s record, they’re kept in a storage area that only Rotorcast and its widgets can use.

• Spots: each spot’s name, latitude and longitude, time zone and ground (open ground, trees and houses, or town), when you added it, and which one is your primary spot.
• Drones: each drone’s name, the preset it started from, every limit you set, its flying height and night setting, which one is your default drone, and its checklist items.
• Checklist history: for each checklist you finish, the date and time, the spot’s and drone’s names, how many checks you ticked out of how many, and whether you tapped Open the NATS airspace map during it.
• Forecasts: the last forecast fetched for each spot, with the Kp forecast. A forecast is stored against the spot’s identifier, not its name or coordinates.
• What the widgets need: a copy of your primary spot (its name, coordinates, time zone and ground), your default drone’s limits, whether the 07:00 notification is on, your units, and a record of Rotorcast Plus (whether it’s active, whether you’ve ever had it, when it ends, whether it renews and when that was last checked).
• Settings: your wind and temperature units, the spot and drone the Forecast shows, the notification switch, and whether you’ve seen your first forecast yet.
• For Apple’s rating prompt: the version of the app that last asked Apple to show the prompt, so that Rotorcast asks no more than once a version. It asks only once you have finished three checklists with every check ticked, which it counts from your checklist history rather than storing a count.
• Housekeeping: Apple Weather’s attribution and logo, a count of forecast requests per day for up to the last 31 days, when each spot’s forecast was last tried and when a try last failed (by the spot’s identifier), and when the widget last fetched a forecast and for which spot.

None of this is synced to iCloud or sent to Mirentha. If you back up your iPhone to iCloud or to a computer, it’s included in that backup in the same way as any other app’s data.

4. What leaves your iPhone, and why

Apple Weather

To fetch a forecast, Rotorcast sends a spot’s latitude and longitude to Apple’s WeatherKit service, which returns the forecast for that place. It does this whenever the Forecast shows a spot whose forecast is more than an hour old, including when you come back to the app or your connection returns, and when you pull down to refresh. With Rotorcast Plus, a spot that becomes your primary spot is fetched straight away if it has no forecast yet, and the widget refreshes your primary spot’s forecast, at most every three hours and not between 22:00 and 05:00. After a forecast arrives, Rotorcast asks Apple for the Apple Weather attribution and, if it hasn’t stored the current one, downloads Apple Weather’s logo.

Apple Maps

When you add a spot, Rotorcast uses Apple Maps to find it and to look up its name and time zone. What it sends depends on how you add it: the words you type in the search, the point you tap on the map, or your location when you tap Use my location. The map in Add spot loads Apple Maps for the area on screen. If a spot’s time zone couldn’t be found when you added it, Rotorcast asks Apple Maps for it again, using the spot’s coordinates, whenever the Forecast shows that spot while you’re online, including when you come back to the app, when your connection returns and when you pull down to refresh, until it finds one.

NOAA

Rotorcast downloads the public Kp forecast file published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (services.swpc.noaa.gov), at most every three hours once a download has succeeded. The request carries none of your data, though, like any web server, NOAA’s receives your internet address with it. See NOAA’s privacy policy.

The App Store

Purchases and subscription checks go to Apple’s App Store; see section 7.

Links you choose to open

The Drone Code (CAA), NATS’s airspace map, the Apple Weather legal page and our own terms, privacy and support pages open when you tap them, in your web browser or in a view inside Rotorcast, and those sites’ own policies apply.

Who handles it

Apple is the only third party that receives your spots, searches or location from Rotorcast, and only what each request needs. We confirm that Apple gives that data the same or equal protection as this policy describes: it handles it under the Apple Privacy Policy. NOAA receives nothing from the app beyond what comes with any web request, such as your internet address, which its servers handle under NOAA’s privacy policy. Apart from that, Rotorcast doesn’t share personal data with anyone, and it contains no third-party code that could.

5. Your location

Rotorcast asks for permission to use your location while you’re using the app, and only when you tap Use my location, in the welcome screens or in Add spot. It asks for a single reading, accurate to about 100 metres, and uses it to add the spot you’re standing at: the reading is sent to Apple Maps to name the place, and once the spot is saved it’s an ordinary spot that you can rename or delete. Rotorcast doesn’t track your location, doesn’t use it in the background and doesn’t keep it anywhere other than as that spot. A saved spot’s coordinates are used like any other spot’s, to fetch its forecast.

You can turn location access off at any time in Settings › Rotorcast › Location. Searching and tapping the map work without it.

6. Notifications

The 07:00 notification (Best window at 07:00, with Rotorcast Plus) is scheduled on your iPhone by the app or its widget, and its text is worked out on your iPhone from the forecast already stored there. Nothing is sent anywhere to deliver it, and Rotorcast doesn’t use push notifications. Rotorcast asks for permission to send notifications only when you turn that switch on. You can turn it off in Rotorcast’s Settings, or in Settings › Notifications › Rotorcast.

7. Purchases

Rotorcast Plus is bought through Apple’s App Store with your Apple Account. Apple handles the payment; Mirentha never sees your payment details or your Apple Account. The app asks the App Store whether you have an active subscription when it opens, when you come back to it, while Settings or the Rotorcast Plus screen is open, and whenever the App Store reports a change to a purchase, and keeps the answer on your iPhone so the widgets can use it. Mirentha receives only the sales and subscription reports that Apple provides to developers, which don’t include your name or contact details.

8. Crash reports from Apple

If you’ve chosen to share analytics with app developers (Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements), Apple may share crash reports and usage statistics about Rotorcast with Mirentha. This is Apple’s feature, controlled by that setting; Rotorcast adds nothing to it.

9. Exporting your data

Settings › Export has two buttons, Spots and drones (CSV) and Checklist runs (CSV). Each makes one CSV file and opens the share sheet, so the file goes only where you send it. A copy stays in the app’s temporary files on your iPhone until iOS clears them.

10. Keeping and deleting your data

What Rotorcast stores stays on your iPhone, and in its backups if you make them, until you delete it:

• Deleting a spot (swipe it in Spots, or open it and tap Delete spot) removes it and its stored forecast. The times its forecast was last tried and last failed stay, stored against its identifier only, until you delete the app.
• Deleting a drone removes it and its checklist. You always keep at least one drone.
• The checklist history can’t be edited or deleted in the app. It keeps the spot and drone names it was saved with, even after you delete that spot or drone.
• Your settings, the record of Rotorcast Plus, Apple Weather’s attribution and the count of forecast requests can’t be deleted in the app. None of them holds a spot’s name or coordinates.
• Deleting Rotorcast from your iPhone deletes everything it stored there, including the widgets’ copy.

Mirentha holds none of this data, so there’s nothing for us to delete on our side, and we can’t see or recover it for you. You can change Rotorcast’s permissions at any time in Settings › Rotorcast.

11. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability over personal data held about you. Mirentha holds no personal data from the app, so you can exercise those rights over your Rotorcast data directly on your iPhone, as section 10 describes. For anything we do hold, such as a message you’ve sent us, contact [email protected]. If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, please tell us first so we can put it right; you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

12. Children

Rotorcast isn’t directed at children under 13, and it doesn’t knowingly collect personal data from anyone, children included.

13. Changes to this policy

If a version of Rotorcast changes what the app stores or sends, we’ll update this policy before that version is released and change the date at the top of this page.

14. Contact

Mirentha Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. Email [email protected]. For help with the app, see Rotorcast support; the app’s licence terms are in the Rotorcast terms of use.