Privacy Policy

What Vigil collects, what Vigil transmits, and what Vigil stores. Short version: as little as possible.

Effective date

2026-06-04

App

Vigil (macOS and visionOS)

Developer

Juergen Klaassen / Klaassen Consulting

What Vigil collects

Nothing on a Vigil-operated server. Vigil has no backend. There is no account to create, no login, and no telemetry pipeline reporting your activity to us.

What Vigil stores locally

On your device only, never transmitted anywhere by Vigil:

• Your watchlist (saved locations), via Apple’s SwiftData framework.
• Your settings: chosen layer toggles, appearance preferences, sort modes, ambient-mode preferences.
• A cache of recently fetched layer data (weather snapshots, earthquake feeds, news items, etc.) to avoid re-downloading them on every refresh. Cleared automatically when stale.
• Your chat history with the on-device AI assistant, if you have enabled it.
• An optional OpenSky Network account key, if you choose to add one for higher flight-data rate limits — stored in the system Keychain. Never logged, never transmitted to Vigil.

Resetting Vigil from the system Settings app deletes all of the above.

What Vigil transmits, and to whom

Vigil fetches data from the providers you have enabled. We act as the conductor; the providers are the orchestra. Each network request you trigger flows directly from your device to the provider you chose:

• WeatherKit (weatherkit.apple.com) — weather forecasts. Operated by Apple. Attribution & data source notice.
• USGS (earthquake.usgs.gov) — earthquake event feed. Public-domain data.
• OpenSky Network (opensky-network.org) — live flight data. Used anonymously by default; an optional free account raises the rate limit.
• Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com) — air-quality index.
• RainViewer (rainviewer.com) — weather radar tile imagery.
• RSS / Atom feed servers you add yourself — news layer.
• Apple servers (itunes.apple.com, sandbox.itunes.apple.com) — for receipt validation (Vigil is a paid app) and TestFlight metadata during betas.

Each provider’s privacy policy applies to the data you exchange with them. Vigil does not interpose on or log those exchanges.

Crash reporting

The macOS version of Vigil ships with PLCrashReporter for fault analysis. Crash reports are stored locally and require your explicit consent before being shared with the developer. The visionOS version uses Apple’s built-in crash reporting — that telemetry is governed by Apple’s privacy policy, not Vigil’s.

What Vigil does not do

• No analytics. No tracking pixels. No advertising identifiers.
• No third-party SDKs that collect data.
• No remote logging.
• No cloud sync of watchlist, settings, or chat (CloudKit container is reserved for v1.1; entitlements are present but no data is synced today).
• No background activity beyond what you have configured (e.g., scheduled layer refresh).

Calendar access

If you enable the Calendar layer, Vigil reads upcoming events from your local Calendar database via Apple’s EventKit, geocodes any addresses they contain, and renders them as pins on the globe. Event details remain on your device. Access requires explicit permission via the system prompt; you can revoke it at any time in System Settings.

Location

If you turn on Proximity sorting for the feed, Vigil requests when-in-use location access and reads your approximate (coarse) location to order the feed by what’s happening nearest you. Your location is used only on your device to compute that ordering — it is never stored and never transmitted, by Vigil or anyone else. Access requires explicit permission via the system prompt; you can revoke it at any time in System Settings, and the feed simply falls back to most-recent ordering.

AI briefings and chat (on-device)

Vigil’s AI briefing and chat run entirely on your device using Apple’s built-in Foundation Models. There is no account and no API key, and nothing — not your prompts, the globe context, or the responses — is sent to Vigil or any third-party AI service. The feature works offline.

Children’s privacy

Vigil has no age-gated features and does not knowingly target users under 13. The app collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Contact

Questions about this policy: juergen@klaassen.consulting.

Changes to this policy

If material changes are made to this policy, they will be published at this URL with an updated effective date. Vigil does not have a mechanism to notify existing installs of policy changes.