Privacy

Outpost is built to work without knowing who you are. Here is what happens when you use it.

No accounts, no cookies

There are no accounts and no sign-up. Outpost stores no cookies and no IP addresses. To count unique visitors, and to give each network its daily share of maps, it keeps only salted one-way hashes, which change every day and every month. Daily ones are deleted after 40 days and monthly ones after 13 months.

The map and address search

Address searches and map views are served by Mapbox, which may collect usage telemetry. When you check a location, your browser asks public map services directly for the live checks. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service wetlands service (hosted by the USGS) and the USGS elevation service receive its coordinates. The USDA Forest Service’s Wildfire Hazard Potential service (on the federal GeoPlatform) receives them only for points on federal land. The California Geological Survey’s landslide map (hosted by Esri) receives the address of the map tile that contains the point.

Scorecard links

A scorecard link contains the location you picked, after the “#” in the address. Browsers don’t send that part of an address to any server, so the location stays in your browser unless you share the link.

Hosting and page counts

Cloudflare, which hosts this site, keeps standard request logs and counts page views with its cookieless Web Analytics. The map page loads its fonts from Google Fonts. These text pages load no other scripts.