Heliogram privacy

Effective 2026-09-28

Heliogram collects no personal data. It has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking, and we never learn who you are.

What leaves your Mac

To show the Sun, Heliogram downloads recent pictures and short videos of it from imagery.myheliograph.com, which is served by Cloudflare, or from Amazon Web Services when that server cannot be reached. The version downloaded from this website also checks gilly.space, which is hosted by GitHub, once a day for a newer version of itself.

Each of these requests carries what any web request carries: your IP address, along with the name and version of the app and of macOS. We do not log these requests ourselves, and we never sell them, share them or combine them with anything else. Cloudflare, Amazon and GitHub keep their own routine server records under their own privacy policies.

With Offline turned on (Kiosk turns it on), Heliogram itself makes no network requests at all.

What stays on your Mac

Your settings live in Heliogram's own preferences, and the pictures and videos it downloads are kept in your Mac's caches folder. None of it is sent anywhere.

Purchases

In the App Store version, Kiosk is a one-time purchase sold by Apple. Apple handles the payment, and Heliogram only checks whether the Apple ID signed in on this Mac owns Kiosk. We never see your name, your Apple ID or your payment details.

Links to the print store

A Heliogram screen can show a caption and QR code pointing to myheliograph.com, where prints of the Sun are sold. Following that link visits the My Heliogram website, which is separate from this app. The link tells that site only that the visit came from Heliogram and which picture of the Sun was on screen.

Changes and questions

If this policy changes, the new version will appear on this page with a new date. Questions go to support@myheliograph.com. Heliogram is made by Dr. Chris Gilbert.