Last updated: 8 August 2026
Atalaia is a free app that warns you when a wildfire is near places you care about. It is built so that the answer to “what do you know about me?” is, as nearly as possible, nothing.
There are no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no trackers. Nothing you can be identified by is stored on our servers, because our servers store nothing about users at all.
Stored locally, in your phone’s encrypted app storage, and never transmitted:
Deleting a place removes it immediately. Uninstalling the app removes all of it.
In both cases your position is used on the device and is not sent to us or to anyone else. Whether a fire is near you is calculated on your phone.
You can decline background location. The feature then works only while the app is open.
The app downloads small public files: active fires, fire risk, air quality and wind. Every user downloads the identical file — the request contains no information about your places, your position or what you are looking at.
Our server’s logs record which file was requested, when, and whether it succeeded. They deliberately do not record your IP address: the server is configured to discard the forwarded-address header rather than resolve it, because nothing in Atalaia needs to know who you are and the safest thing to do with data is not to have it.
The connection reaches us through Tailscale. Tailscale operates the relay that carries these requests to our machine, so their infrastructure necessarily sees connection details — the IP address the request came from, when it happened, and how much data moved. It cannot see the contents: the encrypted connection is terminated on our own machine, not on theirs. This is the one place where your IP address is visible to a third party in the course of using the app, and we would rather say so than leave it out.
To receive alerts, your device registers with Google’s push service. Google receives:
Google does not receive your identity, your exact coordinates, or the names you gave your places. Alerts themselves are sent as silent messages containing only public information about a fire; your phone then decides, locally, whether that fire is close enough to tell you about.
Google acts as a data processor for this. See Google’s privacy policy for their own practices.
When you open the map, your device requests map tiles. This reveals the area you are looking at to the tile provider. Tiles are only fetched when you have the map open, never in the background.
These searches are made by your device, at your request. Our server is not involved and does not see them.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Location (while in use) | Centre the map on you; set a place where you are |
| Location (background) | Optional. One geofence so alerts follow you with the app closed |
| Notifications | Show fire alerts |
| Ignore battery optimisation | Optional. Asks Android not to suspend the app, so alerts still arrive |
Every one of these can be refused. Refusing background location or the battery exemption reduces what the app can do; it does not break it.
Atalaia is made in Portugal and follows the GDPR. Because we hold no personal data about you on our servers, the usual rights resolve simply:
If you want to exercise a right regarding the FCM push token, contact us at atalaiafogos@gmail.com and we will help, though in practice uninstalling the app unregisters it.
Atalaia is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
Atalaia watches public wildfire data and shows you what it finds. Alerts can be late, wrong, or never arrive at all. It is a complement to the emergency services, never a replacement. In an emergency, always call 112.
If this policy changes materially, the updated version will be published here with a new date, and significant changes will be noted in the app.
Atalaia atalaiafogos@gmail.com
Atalaia uses public data from ANEPC (CC BY 4.0), IPMA, Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0, generated using Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information), the Direção-Geral do Território (CC BY 4.0), and OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Full credits are in the app under About → data sources.