GroundTruth / privacy

Privacy

The short version: we do not want your data. No accounts, no cookies, no trackers, no ads. We never sell or share what you look up.

When you type an address

• Your browser sends the address to our server. To turn it into coordinates, our server passes it to the US Census Bureau's public geocoder and returns the answer. Our lookup service keeps no record of it: it has no query database, and it runs with read-only access to its own data files. The Census Bureau handles geocoder requests under its own policies, which we do not control.
• Lookups are kept out of our web server's access log. The server configuration turns logging off for every lookup path, because a lookup can contain a home address.
• Address lookups are answered with a no-store instruction, which tells shared caches not to keep them.

When you press "Use my location"

Your position is found by your browser, on your device, and only after you say yes to the browser's permission prompt. Only the coordinates are sent to our server. We never see anything else from your device.

What does get recorded

• Ordinary page visits (this page, a Superfund site page) land in a standard web-server access log: the visitor's network (IP) address, the page, the time, the address of the page that linked here (when the browser sends one), and the browser's identification string (its user-agent).
• To slow request floods, the web server holds recent visitor IP addresses briefly in memory. That list is not written to disk.
• If you email us, we see your address and your words, and use them only to answer you.

This page describes how our server and code are configured, which we can check directly. Where a fact is outside our control (what a third party keeps, for example), we say so rather than promise. Spot a gap? Tell us.