Privacy policy
The short version: no accounts, no login, no cookies from us, and no personal data needed to use the site. Here is exactly what is collected and by what.
Our own analytics (first-party, cookieless)
Pages send a small usage beacon to our own server so we can count visits and see which pages help people. It stores no IP address, no cookie, no user-agent string, and no persistent identifier. Daily unique counts use a one-way token derived from connection data plus a secret that rotates every day, so visits can't be linked across days or to a person. Add ?notrack=1 to any URL to turn all measurement off on your device (?notrack=0 re-enables).
Google Analytics
Public pages also load Google Analytics 4 for audience measurement (ad networks and partners generally require it). Google processes your IP to deliver the service; we have Google Signals off (no advertising personalization from our traffic) and we send no personal identifiers. The ?notrack=1 switch disables GA on your device too. Google's own practices: policies.google.com/privacy.
Location searches
When you search a ZIP, address, or use the locate button, the lookup runs in your browser against public geocoding services (Zippopotam, the U.S. Census geocoder, Nominatim/Photon, the FCC area API) and utility-territory data — your query goes to those services to be resolved, the same as using any map site. We do not store your searched locations on our servers; your last-used view may be kept in your own browser's local storage.
Outage alerts (push notifications)
If you turn on alerts, your browser creates an anonymous push subscription (a delivery endpoint minted by your browser vendor) and we store it together with the county or city you chose — that's all: no email, no name, no account. Turning notifications off in your browser, or unsubscribing, invalidates it. Notification decisions ("is your power back?") run on your device.
Feedback
The contact form forwards your message to the operator. Please don't include personal information beyond what you want us to read; messages are used to fix data problems and are not published.
Advertising & affiliate links
Display ads are currently off. If we enable them, ads would be served by Google AdSense, which sets its own cookies/identifiers under Google's policies — this page will be updated the same day that changes. Some preparedness guides contain clearly-disclosed affiliate links (we may earn a commission; it never changes what we recommend, and outbound links carry no tracking from us). Ads never appear inside live outage results, alerts, or emergency callouts — that rule is enforced in code.
What we never do
- No selling or sharing of personal data — we don't have any to sell.
- No cross-site tracking, no fingerprinting, no cookie banners because there are no tracking cookies of ours.
- No accounts, ever, to check an outage.