Privacy Policy

Effective 25 September 2026

BELT tells you where a flight will be bumpy before you take off. To do that it needs your flight number and, if you let it, your position. That is the whole of it: there is no account, no advertising, and nothing here is sold.

The short version

No account, no login. You never give BELT a name, an email or a password, because there is nowhere to put one.
Your precise location drives the 3D flight view, follows your own seat in flight, senses the ride, and walks you to your gate. It is optional and you can switch it off in iOS Settings.
Bump reports go up by default — one coarse point per bump, plus the flight number and a random install id. Nothing is sent for the smooth minutes in between.
The full ride log — a continuous position track — is off unless you turn it on.
You can erase it. Settings › Privacy › Delete my uploaded data removes everything this phone ever sent.
No tracking, no ads, no data sale, no analytics SDKs.

Who we are

BELT ("the app") is made by Goliard Labs LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("we", "us"). This policy covers the BELT iOS app, the BELT Apple Watch companion, and the 3D flight view we host at belt-cesium.web.app that the app loads inside itself.

What the app uses on your device

Location (precise, optional)

With your permission BELT uses your phone's GPS at full precision. Coarse location is not enough for what the app does: the 3D flight view has to draw the world from your actual seat, the ride sensor has to know which mile of the route a bump belongs to, and the gate directions have to know which concourse you are standing in.

If you turn on in-flight following, BELT may keep location running in the background during the armed window around departure, so it does not miss the takeoff while your phone is in your pocket. Outside that window it stops. You can revoke location entirely at any time in iOS Settings › BELT › Location; the app keeps working, it simply cannot follow you.

Motion sensors (optional)

The ride sensor reads the accelerometer and gyroscope to measure the turbulence you are actually feeling. The recording is written to a file on your phone. Whether any of it leaves the phone is governed by the two switches described below.

Local network — GPS Link (optional)

GPS Link lets a Wi-Fi-only iPad borrow your iPhone's GPS. The two devices talk directly over Apple Multipeer or Bluetooth after you approve a pairing code. No server is involved. If both radios go silent mid-flight, the iPhone can relay its own signed position through our server as a fallback; that relay carries a position and a pairing identifier, nothing else.

What leaves your device

What	Where it goes	Default
Flight lookups — the flight number or route you type	BELT's backend, then flight-data providers, to fetch the schedule, gate, route and live position	On (it is the app)
Bump reports — where a bump began (about 10 m), how strong, how long, flight number, aircraft type, a random install id	BELT's crowd ride database, so other BELT flyers see the bump ahead of them	On. Settings › Privacy › Share bump reports
Full ride log — the whole session: motion samples about once a second and a continuous GPS track for the entire flight	BELT's server, uploaded once after landing, used only to calibrate turbulence sensing	Off. Settings › Privacy › Share full ride log
Captain BELT briefings and questions — the briefing request or your question, plus that flight's data	BELT's server, which asks an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) for the words and then renders them as speech	On when you ask for a briefing
3D flight view — your flight and, if enabled, your position	Handed to the hosted page on your device; the page then fetches map tiles, weather and airport layouts from their providers	On when you open the view

A bump report is a moment, not a trail. Nothing is sent for the smooth minutes between bumps. The full ride log is the opposite — it is a continuous track — which is exactly why it is a separate switch that starts off, and why a copy always stays on your phone whether you share it or not. You can export that copy yourself from the RIDE SENSOR card.

The install identifier

The first time BELT runs it generates a random identifier for itself. It is not your Apple ID, not an advertising identifier, and it contains nothing about you. Its only jobs are to stop abuse of our backend, to cap AI costs, and to let Delete my uploaded data find your uploads again. The server stores it as a hash. Deleting and reinstalling BELT creates a new one.

Captain BELT and the AI

When you ask for a briefing or ask a question, the text and the flight's data go to our server, which passes them to Anthropic's Claude and returns the answer, then turns the answer into cabin-PA audio. Our API keys stay on the server and never sit in the app. Your questions are not linked to a person, and we do not use them to train anything.

What we do not do

No accounts, no sign-in, no contact list, no photos.
No advertising, no advertising identifiers, no ad networks.
No tracking across other apps or websites.
No selling, renting or sharing of data with data brokers.
No third-party analytics SDKs. The only integrity check is Firebase App Check, which verifies that a request came from a genuine copy of BELT.

Deleting your data

Open Settings › Privacy in BELT and tap Delete my uploaded data. After the confirmation, every bump report and ride log stored on our server for this install is removed, along with anything still queued to upload. Your sharing switches are left exactly as you set them. Deleting the app removes everything held on the phone.

If the button will not complete — no signal, for instance — email us and we will do it by hand.

How long we keep things

Bump reports age out of the crowd layer once they stop being useful to other flyers; ride logs are kept only while they are being used to calibrate the turbulence model. Retention: bump reports for 12 months, ride logs for 90 days, or sooner if you delete them from Settings.

Children

BELT is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Where the data goes (third parties)

BELT draws on public and licensed aviation data. Each of these has its own privacy policy and terms; a request for a map tile or a weather field necessarily reveals your IP address and the area you asked about to that provider.

adsb.lol — community ADS-B aircraft positions. Data © adsb.lol contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL).
NASA GIBS / EOSDIS — geostationary satellite cloud imagery (GOES, Himawari).
Flightradar24 — the open 3D aircraft model set, used under the GNU GPL v2.0.
NOAA / aviationweather.gov — METARs, TAFs, PIREPs, turbulence guidance. US Government work, no key required.
Open-Meteo — cloud and wind fields, licensed CC BY 4.0.
FlightAware AeroAPI — schedules, gates and aircraft types (queried by our server, not by the app).
AeroDataBox — schedule and gate fallback.
Cesium ion — terrain and the 3D globe.
Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles — the photoreal ground in the 3D flight view.
Apple Maps (MapKit) — the flat map, search and place names.
Google Firebase — hosting for the 3D page, Cloud Functions, and the crowd ride database.
Anthropic — the AI model behind Captain BELT.

Your rights

Because BELT holds no account, the practical form of every data right is the same one button: Delete my uploaded data. If you are in a jurisdiction that gives you a right of access, correction, portability or objection and you want to exercise it, email us with the approximate dates and flight numbers and we will do what we can — bear in mind that without your install identifier there is nothing that points at you.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page and the effective date above when something changes, and call out anything material in the app's release notes.

Governing law

This policy is governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Contact

Questions, deletion requests, anything at all: hello@goliard.app