Privacy
Last updated 5 August 2026
This page describes what the site actually stores, in the terms the code uses. If something here does not match what the site does, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
Anything you type into a report description becomes part of a public record, visible to anyone, indefinitely. Write it as though it will be read by the agency, by your neighbours, and by a journalist. Do not put anyone's name in it, including your own.
What a report stores
| Stored | Deliberately not stored |
|---|---|
| Road name, hundred-block, nearest cross street, city, county, state, ZIP | House numbers. N4821 Example Rd is reduced to N4800 block of Example Rd before it is written. |
| A point on the centreline of the road. Your pin is moved onto the roadway before anything is written, so the stored coordinate identifies public pavement rather than a building. | The exact point you clicked. If we cannot match a road at all (a pin in a park or open ground), the coordinate is rounded to about 110 metres instead, because an unmatched point could sit over a house. Both happen in the browser and again on the server. |
| The defect type, the agency we determined is responsible, and dates | Your name, your address, your account. There are no visitor accounts. |
| Your description, after automatic scrubbing | Anything shaped like a street address, phone number, or email address is replaced before storage. |
Personal names are not detected. No pattern finds them reliably, so we do not claim to strip them. If a name reaches a public record, use the correction link on that record and we will remove it.
What we keep to stop abuse
Two values, and both are salted hashes rather than the original:
- A random session identifier, held in a cookie that scripts cannot read. It is what enforces one report and one confirmation per person per record. It is not linked to your identity and we cannot use it to recognise you anywhere else.
- Your IP address, hashed with a secret salt held only in our server environment. It is used for rate limiting and nothing else. We do not store or log the address itself.
Hashed rate-limit buckets are deleted nightly once they expire.
Cookies
One cookie for ordinary visitors, row_sid, described above. It
is strictly necessary for the one-report-per-person rule and carries no
advertising or analytics identifier. Moderators get a second, separate
sign-in cookie. There are no third-party or advertising cookies, and no
cross-site tracking, so there is no consent banner to click.
When you contact us
The correction form and the site-problem form store the name, email
address, organisation, and message you provide, plus a hashed IP address.
These are held in a private moderation queue and are not published. An email
address ending in .gov, .mil, or .us is
flagged as a possible official dispute, which only changes how quickly we
respond; it is treated as a hint and never as proof of identity.
Who else sees your request
Using the site necessarily discloses your IP address to the services that serve it. We do not control their handling of that data:
- Cloudflare: hosting, the database, and the anti-bot check on submissions.
- US Census Bureau geocoder: receives the coordinate you pin, to determine which governments it falls in.
- OpenStreetMap: the map tiles you view, and the reverse geocoder we ask for a road name, both receive your coordinate. The road database is queried by our own server rather than by your browser, so it sees our address and not yours.
- Google Fonts: serves the typefaces. The map library is served from this site, not a third party.
- Stripe: only if you choose to contribute. Payment details are entered on Stripe's own pages; we never see or hold them.
Your location
"Use my location" asks your browser, and your browser asks you. If you agree, the coordinate is used to move the map and is then treated exactly like any other pin: snapped to the nearest road before storage, or rounded to about 110 metres if no road matches. A location taken indoors is therefore recorded as the street outside, not as the building you are in. Declining costs you nothing; you can search an address or pan the map instead.
Getting something removed
Use the correction link on the record. We aim to answer within seven days, or three working days for a documented official dispute. We can redact a description, correct a record, or withdraw one from public view. Moderation actions are written to an append-only audit log, so a removal is itself recorded.
Children
This is not a service directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
Material changes will be reflected here with a new date at the top of the page.