Privacy Policy

Last updated: February 2026

Overview

Mars Vista provides access to NASA Mars rover photos. We collect minimal analytics data to understand how the site is used and to improve the experience. We do not use cookies, we do not track you across websites, and we do not sell or share your data with third parties.

What we collect

When you visit a page, we record the following information:

  • Page path — which page you visited (e.g. /gallery, /rovers/curiosity)
  • Referrer — the page that linked you here, if any
  • Screen dimensions — your screen width and height
  • IP address — used to determine your approximate location (country, city, region) and then stored
  • User agent — your browser and operating system, used to determine device type
  • View duration — how long you spent on each page

What we do not collect

  • We do not use cookies or local storage for tracking
  • We do not use third-party analytics services (e.g. Google Analytics)
  • We do not collect personal information such as names, emails, or accounts
  • We do not track you across different websites
  • We do not serve ads or share data with advertisers

How we identify visitors

We do not use cookies or persistent identifiers. To estimate unique visitor counts, we generate a daily session hash from your IP address and user agent, combined with a salt. This hash cannot be reversed to recover your IP address and resets every day, so we cannot track you across days or build a profile of your activity over time.

Location data

We use your IP address to look up your approximate geographic location (country, region, and city) via a geolocation service. This helps us understand where our visitors come from. The location data is stored alongside the page view record. We do not use precise geolocation or GPS data.

Data retention

Analytics data is stored indefinitely to help us understand long-term usage trends. Since we do not collect personal accounts or use persistent identifiers, this data cannot be used to identify individual users over time.

Third-party services

The site is hosted on infrastructure that may process your request metadata (IP address, headers) as part of normal web serving. Photo images are sourced from NASA/JPL-Caltech and loaded directly from their servers, which are subject to NASA's privacy policy.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, you can reach out via the GitHub repository.