BumpySkies offers a free turbulence forecast service that anyone can use without an account. It also offers an optional Premium tier with extra features — including notifications when a future flight's forecast is ready — that requires you to sign in with an email address and pay a small monthly subscription. This policy describes how BumpySkies handles your information across both tiers.
Browsing BumpySkies as a free user is essentially anonymous. There's no need to sign in, and BumpySkies does not require you to share any personally identifying information in order to look up turbulence forecasts.
BumpySkies does use essential logging and analytics tools, including locally stored webserver logs and Google Analytics, in order to profile overall traffic and help me monitor the service's health. These tools collect technical information like IP addresses, browser types, and pages visited. Local webserver logs are automatically rotated and discarded after 14 days.
Subscribing to the newsletter does require you to provide an email address, and my occasional user surveys often include an option to voluntarily share your email for followup contact.
Signing up for BumpySkies Premium creates an account tied to the email address you provide. To support that account, BumpySkies stores:
BumpySkies sets a single first-party cookie of its own: an authentication cookie that holds your sign-in session identifier, set when you log into a Premium account. This cookie is strictly necessary for the Premium features to work — without it, the site can't tell that you're logged in — and it expires automatically after 180 days, or sooner if you sign out. If you don't have a Premium account or aren't signed in, BumpySkies does not set any first-party cookies of its own.
Google Analytics, used as described above, sets its own third-party cookies (typically named _ga and _gid) to recognize unique visitors and measure overall site traffic. You can opt out of Google Analytics in any browser by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
If you opt in on your account page and provide a mobile phone number, BumpySkies may send you automated text messages related to your account's pending flight notifications. These messages are limited to operational notifications: alerts that a turbulence forecast is ready for a flight you've asked to be notified about, and occasional account-related status messages (for example, confirming that you've opted in or out of SMS).
BumpySkies does not send marketing or promotional text messages.
Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. To stop receiving text messages from BumpySkies, reply STOP to any message BumpySkies sends. For help, reply HELP, or contact me at jmac@bumpyskies.com.
To deliver text messages, BumpySkies shares your phone number with Twilio, its SMS platform provider, solely so that Twilio can deliver those messages on the service's behalf. BumpySkies does not sell, rent, or share your mobile phone number or SMS opt-in information with any other third party for marketing or promotional purposes.
BumpySkies uses Stripe to process subscription payments. When you subscribe, you enter your payment details directly with Stripe; BumpySkies itself never sees or stores your credit card information. Stripe returns a customer identifier and subscription identifier, which BumpySkies stores alongside your account so that the service can recognize your subscription status. For more information about how Stripe handles your data, see Stripe's privacy policy.
BumpySkies uses Mailgun to deliver transactional email, including magic-link sign-in messages and flight forecast notifications. BumpySkies shares your email address with Mailgun solely so that Mailgun can deliver those messages on the service's behalf. BumpySkies does not use your email address for marketing without your separate, explicit opt-in to the BumpySkies newsletter.
No matter what the future brings for BumpySkies, I pledge that the service will never willingly share, sell, or otherwise expose any personal or sensitive user data to any third parties for marketing purposes, ever. The only third parties BumpySkies shares data with are the operational service providers named above (Stripe, Twilio, Mailgun, Google Analytics), and only to the extent necessary for them to do their job.
If new BumpySkies features ever require additional user information, I'll update this policy accordingly.
If you have any questions about how BumpySkies handles user data, please get in touch.