We do not collect data about you.

In short

• No account, no sign-in. The app works straight after installation.
• No ads, no analytics, no tracking tools. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel and no third-party statistics SDK.
• No cookies. The site and the app set no cookies at all — neither our own nor anyone else’s. That is why there is no consent pop-up here.
• Your location never reaches our server. We never store it. The exceptions are in GROTA: a route to shelter (the position and destination go to a public routing server) and the “Around a place” offline map, whose download lets our server and Cloudflare infer the area to within a square of about 12 by 20 km (section 2).
• Notifications go to provinces, not to people. We do not know who receives them.
• We do not sell or share data with anyone for marketing. There is nothing to sell.

1. What stays on your device only

We do not use cookies. We checked this on 27 September 2026 across every address on the site: we set no cookie of any kind, including the ones a browser does not show in its developer tools. Neither does the map tile server. There is no analytics here, no advertising pixel and nothing that would follow you between websites.

A cookie consent banner is required when a site stores something on your device that is not necessary for the site to work. We store only your own settings — listed below — so you will not see such a pop-up here. If that ever changes, we will change this policy too and say so in the release notes.

The app's storage (the browser's localStorage) holds your settings and nothing else:

• My places — the names and coordinates of the points you added yourself;
• the provinces you watch, the language, map and sound settings;
• the buffer of the last 12 hours of history, fetched from the server so that scrubbing stays smooth.

None of this is sent to our server or anywhere else. On Android, system backup is disabled for the app (allowBackup=false), so it does not reach Google Drive either. You remove all of it by uninstalling the app or clearing its data in system settings; in a browser, by clearing the site data.

2. Location

The location permission is optional. It is used only to drop a one-off “I am here” point when you add a place, and to centre the map. The coordinates stay on the device — we do not send them to the server, do not store them and do not pass them to anyone. You can decline and pick the place on the map by hand; the app works exactly the same.

Notifications do not depend on GPS. You pick provinces from a list, and that is the only information about what you watch.

GROTA — where to shelter (Android and iPhone app)

GROTA uses your location to show the nearest shelter points. The list of points and the search for the nearest one run on the phone, without sending the position. Only this leaves the phone, and only after you do something:

• the route — after you press NOW, immediately and without a separate question, and also when you plot a route on the map: your exact position and the coordinates of the suggested point go to the public FOSSGIS routing server (OSRM on OpenStreetMap data), which draws the way. Offline, GROTA shows the straight-line distance and sends nothing;
• address search — the typed address goes to the GUGiK search service;
• the point's photo — the point's coordinates go to the Geoportal (GUGiK) photo service;
• the base map — the part of the map you view, from OpenFreeMap, as in Strażnik's map; with the map downloaded to the phone nothing is sent;
• data packages — the shelter files for a province, downloaded from our server; the file name only says which province;
• offline map — you download map packages from our server. We request the pieces covering the area you chose, so the server and Cloudflare, through which it runs, see which grid squares you ask for — each about 12 by 20 kilometres. The download alone therefore reveals the area you want an offline map for, to within such a square, not to an address. To avoid that, choose Province or All of Poland instead of Around a place;
• Google — only after you press Navigate or Street View; Google's terms apply from then on.

Without these actions GROTA sends nothing from the phone. Places and settings saved in it stay on the device, like Strażnik's My places.

3. Notifications

Android and iOS app

The app subscribes in Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google) to a “topic” that corresponds to a province, for example voiv_lubelskie. We send the alert to the topic, not to individual devices. Our server holds no list of devices and no device identifiers (tokens) — we do not know how many phones watch a given province, or which ones. Google acts as the carrier and processes the app installation identifier under its own privacy policy.

Notifications in a browser

If you enable notifications on the website, the browser issues a push endpoint (an address at Google, Mozilla or Apple, together with encryption keys). We store that address and the chosen province in the server database — otherwise a notification cannot be delivered. This is the only data tied to a particular browser that we keep. The address contains no name, e-mail address or location, and does not let us work out who you are.

The entry disappears when you turn notifications off in the app or in browser settings, and also when the push provider reports that the subscription has expired.

4. What the server sees and stores

Traffic to the server passes through Cloudflare, which sees the IP address and protects the service against overload (under its own policy). On our server:

• the access log is switched off — IP addresses and requested paths are not written to disk;
• the IP address is used only briefly, in memory, for request limits, so that a single sender cannot take the service down for everyone. It does not reach the database or the backups;
• the database holds data about threats, not about people: signals from public sources, snapshots of the map from the last 12 hours, an archive of ADS-B aircraft positions for 14 days, and a log of alerts sent (province, level, time). None of these entries is linked to a user.

Database backups are made every six hours and are encrypted. They contain the browser push subscriptions from section 3 — there is no other user data in the database. Backups are kept for at most 12 months: all of them from the last two days, older ones one per day, week and month.

5. Third parties

Each of them sees an ordinary network request carrying your IP address, because otherwise the data could not be delivered. We pass them nothing beyond that:

• Mikrus — hosting of the Strażnik server;
• Cloudflare — tunnel, protection and acceleration of traffic to the server;
• Google Firebase — delivery of notifications to the app;
• GitHub — app downloads, update checks and this page (GitHub Pages);
• OpenFreeMap — map tiles and label fonts, based on OpenStreetMap data;
• FOSSGIS (OSRM routing server) and GUGiK (address geocoding, orthophoto) — in GROTA only, see section 2.

Object photos and illustrations are bundled inside the app — we do not fetch them from outside services. Normally the data sources — publishers' pages included — are read by our server, not by your phone. You open an article link in your own browser, and from that point the publisher's own rules apply.

Emergency mode — when our server does not respond

If the app or the website cannot reach the Strażnik server, it switches to emergency mode (the top of the screen then says “emergency mode”) and fetches data from public sources itself. Your phone or browser then connects directly to the services below. Each of them sees your IP address and an ordinary request — we do not send them your location, settings or any identifier. Emergency mode ends on its own once the server responds again.

• NEPTUN — aerial objects over Ukraine: neptun.in.ua;
• adsb.lol — ADS-B air traffic: api.adsb.lol;
• RCB and RSO — announcements and alerts: www.gov.pl, komunikaty.tvp.pl (the Regional Warning System portal run by Polish public broadcaster TVP);
• PAŻP (Polish Air Navigation Services Agency) — airspace zones: airspace.pansa.pl;
• Google News — search for media reports: news.google.com;
• publishers' RSS feeds — www.lublin112.pl, radio.lublin.pl, www.dziennikwschodni.pl, www.lrt.lt, www.15min.lt, www.lsm.lv, eng.lsm.lv, www.err.ee, news.err.ee.

Google, Cloudflare and GitHub are based in the United States, so your IP address and app installation identifier may be processed by them outside the European Economic Area — under the terms described in their privacy policies.

6. App permissions

• Notifications — to show the alert.
• Location (optional) — the “I am here” point when adding a place, centring the map, and in GROTA the nearest shelter points and the route to them; see section 2.
• Internet and network state — fetching the map state and detecting a lost connection.
• Installing packages — installing an update downloaded from GitHub (Android, outside the Play Store).
• Battery optimisation exemption, waking the screen and full-screen alert — so that the alert arrives while the phone sleeps.
• Vibration — the alert signal.

The app does not ask for access to contacts, photos, files, the microphone or the camera.

7. Your rights and contact

There are no accounts, so there is no record in which we could find you. The only device-related data — a browser push subscription — you delete yourself by turning notifications off. The remaining settings disappear when you uninstall the app or clear its data.

Data controller: Piotr Kukier, the project's author. If you want to ask about data processing, exercise your rights or point out a mistake in this policy, write through the contact form on cukierrro.pl or an issue in the project repository. We reply within one month at the latest.

Legal bases (Art. 6(1) GDPR):

• browser push subscriptions and serving the app's requests, including offline map packages — point (b): providing the service you ask for;
• brief in-memory use of the IP address for request limits, and traffic protection by Cloudflare — point (f): legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and available to everyone;
• replying to a message from the form or an issue — point (f): handling correspondence you start.

How long: a push subscription — until you turn notifications off or the push provider reports it expired, and in backups for at most 12 months after that; the IP address — only in the server's memory, for at most 10 minutes; settings on your device — until you delete them.

Your rights: access to your data, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection to processing based on legitimate interest, and data portability. We do not know who you are, so we may be unable to tell which subscription is yours (Art. 11 GDPR) — the simplest way is to delete it yourself by turning notifications off. We make no automated decisions about you and do no profiling: alerts concern provinces, not people.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in Poland the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO), ul. Stawki 2, 00-193 Warszawa (uodo.gov.pl), or the authority in your own EU country.

The app is not directed at children and does not ask for age.

8. Changes to this policy

Changes are described in the changelog together with the release they belong to. The date at the top of this page says when the current version came into force.