We don’t run any advertising service and this owner will never run an advertising service, so we don’t collect any user information. There is no data flow at all from our products to corporate HQ or to a third party, except as is necessary to complete a sale. We give our product to the store, they sell them. We just collect the money — what’s left of it after their cut anyway. They handle the credit card transactions. We never see it, and they don’t send us that information. We have no idea who you are or anything about you. This is by design.
We look at it this way: If we have private identifying information on our customers and we are hacked then we have released our customers’ private identification information to criminals and thieves. That doesn’t serve us and it doesn’t serve our customers. It is just an enormous problem. So, it is safer for everyone if we just don’t have any private identifying information.
Notably, this is a bit of a risk. If you are unhappy or it would be really great if an Astrolabe Tools product did X, but it doesn’t so no sense buying it, there is no way for us to know. You are welcome to tell us! We want to make our customers happy. You can communicate your feedback here: mailto:[email protected]. Just don’t send us any personal identifying information that you don’t want us to have.
Networking: Some of our products are networked to communicate with other players. Those of you determined to find spying where there is none will now believe that surely that is where the spying occurs? Nope! There are freeware apps that monitor incoming and outgoing connections and you are welcome to check up on us. You will find it didn’t happen. Our products use peer to peer networking. That is, they do not “phone home” to a central server to find out about other players. Instead they use zero configuration networking (zeroconf.org) to query the local network to see if any machines are hosting a compatible service (such as the game you are playing) and connect directly to them. There is no astrolabetools.com server, except the one that hosts our website, and it only hosts the website. As you will see, your machine will not connect to it unless you put that url in your browser or send us an email. There is no spying. This is again by design. We can not be forced to comply with totalitarian government demands if we don’t have your information, never make a network connection to you and have no contact with you whatsoever. Turn over all the information we have on Joe FreedomFighter? Sure! Here is a nice empty file. That is all the information we have. Have a nice day, Sir. We have complied, fully.
Sadly, this means if you want to play with your friends across the country, you’ll have to supply your Internet address to them to do that. This is because, per our privacy policy, we collect NO identifying information (and really no information of any kind, just to be safe) and that would include your IP number. For the tin-foil hats amongst you, yes, once you connect to the other player’s machine, yes, then they have your IP address — that machine has to know how to send responses back. Notably however, Astrolabe Tools does not have that information and we never did. Sorry about the inconvenience, but we do take your privacy seriously.
How to tell your friend your IP address: This can be a little bit complicated because of how the internet works. There are often a variety of devices such as your home wifi router and maybe your ISP which pretend to be a single machine connected to the internet, but actually rebroadcast the data to machines connected behind it under fake/private IP addresses. So, whatever IP address your machine says it has in the network settings control panel might only exist as a private agreement between you and the WiFi router in your living room. If the rest of the internet tries to use it, it won’t work because nobody in the internet at large knows anything about the address, and the packets can’t be delivered. To solve this problem, you have to try to communicate with some machine in the bulk internet and see what it thinks your IP address is. That IP address will be the magic incantation that your friend needs to reach you. Depending on your local internet configuration, these numbers may change frequently. If it worked yesterday but not today, then chances are your IP lease expired and you have to go find out what the new one is again.
One way to get your public IP address is to go to your internet browser and visit a site like https://www.whatismyip.com (We have no connection to these people, whoever they are, and this is not a product endorsement!) That will send you back a webpage with your version 4 IP address (IPv4) which will look something like 22.153.0.32, containing 4 numbers between 0 and 255. It will also send you your version 6 IP address (IPv6) which will look like 8 hexadecimal 4 digit numbers in the range [0-9,a-f]. It may also spy on you a bit and tell you your rough geographical location and your internet service provider. As this is public information, handing out your IP address in this way will tip off the receiver where you are unless you take steps to hide that information, such as through a VPN. Since you aren’t sending that IP to Astrolabe Tools, we won’t know where you are, but your friend across the country surely can, if she bothers to do a lookup. Your tin-foil hat should have alerted you by now that this person could be a corrupt agent of a nefarious power. So proceed accordingly. Astrolabe Tools can not vouch for our users, because once again, we don’t know anything about them.
Send both the IPv4 and IPv6 address to your friend. It may be the case that only one works. Yes, the IPv6 address is a pain, but the internet got bigger than what IPv4 could hold some time ago (https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/faq/), so there could be issues with that. Some fragments of the internet still don’t support iPv6, so you might need both and it is hard to predict which one. Notably however, one of those two must work in some fashion. Otherwise you or your friend couldn’t reach the internet and view webpages. If it still doesn’t work, maybe IPV6 is the only thing that works for you but your friend’s local net can’t use it yet. Sorry about that! We can’t fix the internet, just try to work around it as best we can. It is owned by other people. Again, you shouldn’t have to do this to connect to people in the same local network as you, such as on the couch sitting next to you. Zeroconf networking should make that automatic. This is just for connecting to people far away.