Firstdark

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Almost nothing, and only when you ask for it.

Firstdark has no account, no advertising, no analytics and no third-party trackers. Nothing follows you between apps. There is exactly one situation in which anything about you is stored on a server, and this page is mostly about that one situation.

When Firstdark stores nothing at all

This is the default, and it covers everything the app does except aurora alerts.

The sun, the moon, twilight, the galactic centre and every eclipse calculation are computed on your device. They need no network and send nothing anywhere. Your chosen location, your cached forecast, whether red-light mode is on and your record of what you saw are all held in the app's own storage on your phone. Deleting the app deletes them. They are never uploaded.

Two services your phone talks to directly

Both are ordinary HTTPS requests from your device, the same as loading a web page. Each service sees an IP address, as every server does. Neither receives a name, an account, or any identifier Firstdark created.

When you turn aurora alerts on

Alerts need a server, because the point of them is to watch the forecast while you are asleep and your phone is not. Turning them on creates one row in Firstdark's database — one row per device, nine columns, and this is all of it:

StoredWhat it is, and why
token The push token your phone's operating system issues. It is how a notification reaches your device, and it is the row's key.
lat, lon Where to check for darkness and cloud. Without these an alert cannot know whether the sky above you is worth waking you for.
threshold The Kp your latitude needs, computed once when you subscribe so the server does not recompute it every fifteen minutes.
offset_sec Your site's UTC offset, so "dark" and "quiet hours" mean local time.
quiet_from, quiet_to The hours you asked not to be disturbed.
last_alert_ms When you were last alerted, so you are not woken twice in one storm.
created_ms When the row was made.

There is no name, no email address, no account, and no history of where you have been — the row holds your current coordinates and is overwritten, not appended to. Six of those nine columns are timing and configuration; only the token and the coordinates describe you at all.

What it is never used for

Deleting it

Turn alerts off in the app. That deletes the row immediately — an actual deletion, not a flag.

Deleting the app without turning alerts off leaves the row until its push token stops working, at which point it is removed automatically.

Worth being straight about a limit here: because a row holds no name, no email and no account, there is no way to find yours from an email asking for it. That is the privacy design working as intended, and it is also why the switch in the app is the only reliable route. If you have deleted the app and want the row gone sooner, reinstall, turn alerts on and straight back off — that finds the row by its token and deletes it.

Children

Firstdark is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.

Changes

If Firstdark ever collects something not listed above, this page changes before the feature ships, not after. The date at the top is the date of the last change.

Contact

[email protected] — for privacy questions, deletion requests, or anything wrong on this page.