Privacy

What we collect today: nothing

No account, no sign-up, no cookies, no audience measurement. There is no cookie banner because there are no cookies: the banner announcing them is a consequence of tracking, not a formality in its own right.

What stays in your browser

The atlas reads the time zone your browser already declares, to work out roughly where on Earth you are and show you. It is not a location: it is a band thousands of kilometres wide, it asks no permission because none is needed, and it never leaves your computer. The language you pick is not remembered at all: each page lives at its own address, and the switch at the top is a link, not a saved preference.

What leaves here, and who receives it

Some things are not inside this folder, and your browser goes and fetches them elsewhere. Whoever hands them over sees your IP address, as happens every time a page loads a file from another server. There are three cases, and here they all are.

• fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, only on entering the atlas: the IBM Plex typefaces — the stylesheet from the first address, the font files from the second. The five pages of this site no longer ask for them as of 14 November 2026: here the text uses IBM Plex if you already have it installed, a system face otherwise. On the atlas page the request is still made.
• cdnjs.cloudflare.com, on entering the atlas: the three.js library, which draws the scene.
• NASA Trek, NASA GIBS and Amazon S3 — that is trek.nasa.gov, gibs.earthdata.nasa.gov and s3.amazonaws.com — only while you descend towards the surface of the Moon, Mars or Earth: photographic and elevation tiles, requested by tile number. Looking at the Galaxy, a planetary system or a deep-sky object sends none of these requests: the atlas stays entirely on your computer.

None of them is asked anything about you, and none receives an identifier from us: this is the ordinary mechanism for loading a file from another server. The first two are already gone from these five pages and remain only in the atlas; they will go from there too by bringing the typefaces into the folder, as will the third by bringing in the library. It is on the list. The tiles cannot: they are terabytes of imagery, and they live where they were measured.

You should learn this from this page rather than from a network inspector.

The service logs

The program serving these pages writes the ordinary log lines of a web server: IP address, time, page requested. They exist to keep the thing running and to tell when it has broken. They are not cross- referenced with anything and are not given to anyone.

Who else is in the atlas

not switched on yet · written before, not after

The atlas will let you see who else is looking at it, and exchange a few words with whoever is in the same place as you. Today that feature does not exist: the code is written but it is not connected to the page, and until it is, nothing about you leaves beyond what you have read above.

We are writing this before it is switched on rather than after, because declaring something you do not yet do is harmless, while doing something you have not declared is not. When it is on, it will work like this and not otherwise.

Until you choose a name, you are not in

On opening the atlas your browser will ask the presence service — presenza.<this site’s domain> — how many people are around and where: a single question that says nothing about you. Like every request to another server it will carry your IP address, which Cloudflare sees as the network. No connection stays open, and nothing about you is kept.

When you choose a name

Only then does a connection open, and three things begin to exist:

• the name you chose, which we do not verify and which is not yours: you choose it again every visit, and if you change browser or come back tomorrow nobody — ourselves included — can tell you are the same person;
• where you are looking, meaning the name of the place (Europa, the solar system): never a position on the surface of a body, never a position on Earth;
• what you write, which reaches the people in the same place as you.

None of the three is ever written to disk. They live in the service’s memory while you stay connected and vanish when you close the page. Anyone arriving later reads nothing of what was said: a place here has no memory. Your browser keeps nothing either: no cookies, no remembered name. And your IP address is never written down by us.

The one exception: reports

If someone behaves badly you will be able to block them — you disappear from each other, immediately — and to report them. For a report to be worth anything it has to outlive the moment, so it is the only thing we will keep:

• the reported message, the time, the place, and the names the two people chose on that occasion;
• it is kept for 30 days and then deletes itself;
• only whoever runs the atlas reads it.

If someone is silenced, we will keep for 24 hours a fingerprint of their IP address: not the address, a transformation of it computed with a number that changes every day. The next day that fingerprint matches nobody, not even for us.

Deleting

There will be no archive to delete you from, because there will be no archive: once you close the page, nothing of you remains. Having a report deleted before the 30 days are up will need an address to write to, and it will be published here together with the feature: today there is nothing to report yet.

One thing to know before you write

What you write is read by the people who are in the same place as you at that moment. We do not keep it, but anyone can copy it or photograph it: do not write anything you would not say to a stranger.