GroundRules / 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 search

• Your browser sends your search words (and any scope you added) to our server, which answers from its own copy of the law. The lookup service keeps no record of what you search: it has no query database and writes nothing about a query to disk.
• These pages load nothing from third parties: no analytics, no fonts, no scripts from anyone else. The only requests your browser makes are to our own API.

When you give an address

• An address is used for one thing: finding which jurisdictions govern it. Our server forwards the address to the US Census Bureau's public geocoder and uses the answer in memory to pick the applicable codes. The Census Bureau handles geocoder requests under its own policies, which we do not control.
• We treat a query that contains an address as sensitive: our practice, shared with our sibling services, is to keep lookup paths out of the web server's access log. That setting lives in the server configuration, outside this code, so we state it as our practice rather than something this page can prove; the lookup service itself never records queries either way.

What does get recorded

• Ordinary page visits (this page, the charter) can land in a standard web-server access log: the visitor's network (IP) address, the page, the time, and the browser's identification string.
• To slow request floods, our practice is to rate-limit by network address: the web server keeps a short-lived in-memory count per visitor address. Like the access-log setting above, that mechanism lives in the server configuration, outside this code, so we state it as our practice rather than something this page can prove.
• If you email us, we see your address and your words, and use them only to answer you.

This page describes what our code does, which we can check directly, and names the parts that depend on deployment configuration or on third parties. Spot a gap? Tell us.