Privacy Policy

Effective date: 11 August 2026 · Last reviewed: 11 August 2026

This policy explains what personal data Pilot Journey processes, why, and who receives it. It is provided under Article 13 of the GDPR.

Beren Software, a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) owned by Youri Berentsen, registered with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce under number 89646118 and established in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is the controller. You can reach us atsupport@pilotjourney.app. We have not appointed a data protection officer, as we are not required to.

1. In short

Pilot Journey has no accounts and no cloud sync. Your career is stored in a file on your own computer and we never receive it.

Some things do leave your machine: a licence check, an update check, weather for the airports you fly between, and usage data about the app itself. SimBrief only if you connect it. Sections 3 and 4 cover each one.

Usage data is on by default. You can switch it off under Settings → Account → Privacy, which leaves only one signal per app start. Section 4 says what is in it.

This website is covered too, at the end of section 4. It counts its visitors without a cookie, which is why you were never asked to accept one.

2. What we do not do

• No accounts. There is nothing to register for.
• No personal data in the usage figures. They are on by default and you can switch them off, but the point is that there is nothing in them worth hiding: no name, no routes, no exact figures. See section 4.
• No crash reports unless you send one. What an error actually said is written to a log file on your computer and stays there. With analytics on we count that a crash happened, never what it was.
• No advertising, profiling, cross-site tracking or cookies. Neither the Software nor this website sets a cookie or stores anything on your device for our own purposes. How the website counts its visitors without one is at the end of section 4.
• No cloud sync or backup service. We hold no copy of your career.
• No automated decision-making within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR.
• We never sell or rent personal data.

3. What stays on your computer

All of it, unless section 4 says otherwise: your pilot profile, every flight you fly with its score, track and payout, your money, reputation, licences and fleet, your settings, your inbox, and the automatic career backups.

The email address you can enter under Settings → Account is stored locally for your own reference and is never transmitted.

This data lives in %APPDATA%\pilot-journey on Windows and~/Library/Application Support/pilot-journey on macOS. You can inspect, copy or delete it at any time.

4. What leaves your computer

Licence check

What is sent: your licence key, your computer's network name, a one-way hash of a hardware identifier, and which operating system and app version you are running.

To: us, at licence.pilotjourney.app, hosted by Cloudflare.

When: on activation, on deactivation, and on a re-check roughly every three days.

Why: to confirm the copy has been paid for and to keep one licence tied to one computer.

Basis: Article 6(1)(b) GDPR, necessary to perform our contract with you.

A computer's network name is usually something like "DESKTOP-4F2K91" or "MacBook-Pro", but it can also carry the owner's own name, which makes it personal data. We use it only to label the device slot so you can tell your own machines apart, and the Software shows you the value it sent under Settings → Account.

Update check

What is sent: your IP address and the version you are running, as part of the request.

To: our update server at updates.pilotjourney.app, hosted by Cloudflare.

When: at startup and periodically while the app is open.

Why: to tell you when a new version is available and to download it.

Basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in delivering working and secure software. We weighed this against your interests and consider it proportionate: the data is minimal, we do not link it to a person, we keep no request log and we make no other use of it.

SimBrief, only if you connect it

What is sent: the SimBrief Pilot ID you enter yourself, plus the route, aircraft and passenger count of the flight.

To: Navigraph AB.

When: only when a Pilot ID is set under Settings → Pilot profile, and only when you dispatch or fetch a flight plan.

Why: to create and retrieve your operational flight plan.

Basis: Article 6(1)(b) GDPR, at your request.

Leave the Pilot ID empty and the Software never contacts SimBrief. Navigraph decides what it does with the request under its own privacy policy.

Product analytics

What is sent: which features you open and use, with counts and timings; whether the app crashed; how far a career has got, as broad bands rather than exact figures; the app version; your operating system and language; and a random installation identifier that is not linked to your licence key, your name or your email address.

To: TelemetryDeck GmbH, Germany.

When: on by default, while the app is running. Switching it off under Settings → Account → Privacy stops everything except one signal when the app starts.

Why: to see which parts of the app are actually used, so we know what to improve.

Basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in improving software we sell. There is no name, no route and no exact figure in it, and you can switch it off, so we consider it proportionate. Article 21 gives you the right to object, and the switch is how.

We never send your pilot name, your flights, your routes, your finances or any other career data. The installation identifier only lets us tell one installation's events apart from another's; it does not tell us who you are, and we cannot trace it back to your purchase.

Weather

What is sent: the ICAO codes of the airports on your flight, and your IP address as part of the request.

To: aviationweather.gov, run by the US National Weather Service.

When: when weather is shown for a flight.

Why: to fetch the real METAR, TAF and SIGMET for those airports.

Basis: Article 6(1)(b) GDPR.

Your local network

If you use the Pilot Journey Bridge, the Software finds it over mDNS and then exchanges simulator telemetry with it directly. That traffic stays inside your own network and never reaches us.

This website

Everything above is the Software. This last part is about pilotjourney.app itself, which you are reading now.

What is sent: for each page you open, the address of that page, the site that linked you to it, your country, and whether you are on a desktop or a phone, plus which buttons on the page were clicked. Your IP address and browser are used to work out whether you are a returning visitor and are then discarded: they are hashed with a salt that is thrown away daily and never stored. Nothing is written to your device, so there is no cookie and no banner to click away. The figures are counts, not visitors we can pick out, and we cannot connect them to your purchase or your licence.

To: Plausible Insights OÜ, Estonia, on servers in the EU.

When: while you browse the site.

Why: to see which pages people read and which of them lead to a purchase.

Basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works. There is no identifier, no profile and no cookie in it, so the effect on you is close to none, and no consent is required because nothing is stored on or read from your device.

The contact form. What you type into it — your name, your email address and your message — is sent to us by email through Resend, so that we can answer you. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the form was submitted by a person, and your IP address is used to limit how often the form can be sent from one place. Basis: Article 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR. We keep the mail for as long as the question needs answering.

Your purchase runs in a Paddle overlay on top of this site. What you fill in there goes to Paddle, not to us; section 5 covers it.

5. Your purchase

Licences are sold by Paddle as merchant of record. They collect your name, email address, billing address and payment details to complete the sale and to meet their tax obligations, as an independent controller under their own privacy policy. We never see your payment details.

We read your name and email address from Paddle so we can issue your licence key and email it to you. Those, together with your licence and the computers it runs on, are stored on our own licence server. We use them only to issue and support your licence.

6. Who receives what

We may also disclose data where the law or a competent authority requires it.

7. Data outside the EU

Paddle is based in the United Kingdom, and Cloudflare is based in the United States and operates global infrastructure, so data sent to them may be processed outside the EEA. This happens under the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission, the UK adequacy decision, and, where applicable, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for a copy of those safeguards. Our licence database and the email service are configured to keep data in the EU.

The weather service receives no more than an airport code and your IP address, as a direct result of your own request for that information.

8. How long data is kept

Our licence server holds your licence, the email address it was sold to, the computers it is activated on, and a log of activations and deactivations that records the IP address and country each was made from. We keep those for as long as the licence exists, because a perpetual licence has to be verifiable for as long as you use it. Ask us and we will delete a licence and everything attached to it, which also ends the licence.

At Paddle, your order and invoice records are kept for seven years, as tax law requires.

Analytics events are held by TelemetryDeck for no longer than the purpose in section 4 requires, which is the period their own policy states. They carry no identifier that leads back to you, so there is nothing in them for us to trace or remove on request.

The website statistics are kept as counts for as long as we run the site. The salt that could have tied a visit to a browser is discarded every day, so after that day there is nothing left in them that is about a person.

Everything in section 3 stays on your computer for as long as you leave it there.

9. Your rights

You have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to receive a portable copy (Articles 15 to 21 GDPR).

In practice this concerns your order and activation record, since that is the only data linked to you that we can reach. Everything in section 3 is already under your own control.

Email support@pilotjourney.app and we will respond within one month. There is no charge.

10. Complaints

If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (Postbus 93374, 2509 AJ Den Haag, autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl), or to the authority in the EU country where you live.

11. Children

Pilot Journey is not intended for children under 16, the age set by Dutch law under Article 8 GDPR. We do not knowingly process data of anyone younger, and will delete it if we find that we have.

12. Security

All the connections above use HTTPS. Your career data and licence key sit in the application data folder on your computer, so their security is the security of your own machine. Because we run no server-side store of user content, there is very little on our side that a security incident could expose.

13. Changes to this policy

If what we send, or who receives it, changes, we will publish a new version at pilotjourney.app/legal/privacy with a new version number and date, and note it in the release notes. This is version 1.1, which added the website itself to section 4: version 1.0 described only the Software.

14. Contact

Beren Software
Sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) of Youri Berentsen
Chamber of Commerce (KvK) 89646118
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
support@pilotjourney.app