Privacy Policy

The short version: the map, the state and city pages and the guides need nothing from you — no account, no email, no sign-up. Two optional features involve personal information, and this page says exactly what each one keeps: camera alerts (your email address and an approximate area) and paid reports (handled by Stripe). We do not sell or share personal information, and we do not build a profile of you.

What you can use without giving us anything

Everything except alerts and paid reports. There is no login and no user account anywhere on the site. We do not ask for your name or phone number.

Your location

Both the website and the app include a “cameras near me” feature. When you use it, your device shares your location with the app or the web page running on your own device— it is used only to center the map on you and count nearby cameras. Your coordinates are never uploaded to us, never stored, and never shared with anyone — unless you then ask for a camera alert for that spot, which is covered under camera alerts below. If you never tap “near me,” your location is never requested at all. The mobile app does not request background location and contains no analytics or advertising SDK.

Exposure reports and routes

The exposure report and the route tools are worked out in your browser, against the same public camera file the map uses. The addresses you type are not sent to this site and are not stored by it. Two outside services are involved, and your browser talks to them directly: an address is sent to a geocoder to be turned into coordinates, and the start and end of a drive are sent to a routing service to work out the road route (both are listed under third-party services below). When the map hands a location to the report, it travels in the part of the link after the #, which browsers never send to a server. The addresses of your last report are kept in your browser’s session storage so the page can restore it; closing the tab clears them.

Camera alerts

If you ask to be emailed when a new camera is reported near a place, we store three things: your email address, the centre of the area rounded to about one kilometre, and the radius you chose, along with the name you gave the place. Nothing is stored until you confirm through the link we email you. We use this only to send that alert. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing deletes all of it.

Payments

Paid reports and supporter plans are processed by Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach this site. After a payment, Stripe tells us it succeeded and gives us the email address you entered at checkout, which we use once: to send you a link that restores your access on another device. Access itself is a signed pass kept in your browser’s local storage — there is no password account. If you subscribe to Camera Watch, we keep your email, the places you ask us to watch (rounded to about a kilometre; a watched drive is kept as a simplified line, rounded to about 100 metres) and the state of your subscription as Stripe reports it, so we can send the alerts. Remove a place on your account page at any time; ask us to delete everything through the contact page.

Cookies and analytics

The website uses two analytics tools. Vercel Web Analytics is cookieless and counts page views in aggregate. Google Analytics (GA4) does set cookies (_gaand related) to measure how many people visit and which pages are useful, and which features are used (for example that a report was built — never the address in it). Neither is used for advertising, we do not sell any of it, and there are no ad profiles. If you would rather not be counted, any browser content blocker or “do not track” extension will stop both. The mobile app has no analytics at all.

The website also keeps its own tally of a few steps: that a report was built, that the paid upgrade was shown, and that a checkout was opened or finished. Each is stored as the step, the plan and whether it happened on a phone. No IP address, cookie or identifier is stored with it, so it cannot be tied to you.

Third-party services

Showing a map necessarily involves a few external services, which receive the technical requests needed to draw the map — the same as any map on the web:

• Map tiles are served by OpenFreeMap, built from OpenStreetMap, with Esri as a fallback for browsers that cannot draw them. Your browser requests map data from them as you pan and zoom.
• Address search(on the website) uses OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim geocoder. When you type an address and press search, that text is sent to OpenStreetMap to look up its coordinates. It is not linked to any identity.
• The report map draws its background from OpenFreeMap, and drive routes are worked out by a Valhalla routing service. Your browser sends them the map area being viewed and the two ends of the drive, respectively.
• Payments are processed by Stripe and alert emails are delivered by Resend; alert subscriptions are held in a database hosted by Upstash. Each receives only what it needs to do that job.
• Hosting is provided by Vercel, which processes standard server request logs (such as IP addresses) as part of delivering the site, per its own privacy terms.

Where the camera data comes from

The camera locations shown on the map are community-reported data from OpenStreetMap contributors, published under the Open Database License (ODbL). This is public, open data about equipment installed in public places — it is not personal data about you.

Children

This service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of this page. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent through the contact page. You can also read more about the project on the home page or learn how the data works in our guides.