Privacy policy

Klaxon has no accounts and no analytics. The map stores nothing about you on our side. The one exception is the Pro waitlist, if you join it. This page explains what that means in practice, and names every third party your browser talks to.

The short version

Using the map does not collect personal data. There is no account to create, no analytics script, no advertising, and no cookie set by us. Anything you save on the map is kept by your own browser. The only address we hold is one you typed into the Pro waitlist.

What Klaxon stores about you

Nothing, on our side. The site is a set of static files. There is no database and no server-side code that could record who visited or what they looked at.

Three things are stored locally by your browser, in local storage rather than cookies, and are never sent to us or to anyone else:

• the interface language you chose
• the minimum earthquake magnitude set on the slider
• any places you saved, with their names and coordinates

You can delete all of it whenever you like, either by removing saved places one at a time in the Places panel or by clearing site data for klaxon.live in your browser settings. Because none of it is held anywhere else, deleting it locally deletes it completely.

Location

The map can show how far each event is from a place you saved. If you tap "Use my location", your browser asks your permission and gives Klaxon a coordinate, which is used to work out distances and is stored locally like any other saved place. It is not transmitted, because there is nowhere to transmit it to. Klaxon never requests your location in the background, and refusing the prompt simply means distances are measured from places you add manually instead.

Third parties your browser contacts

Klaxon displays live scientific data, and your browser fetches that data directly from the organisations that publish it. Those requests necessarily reveal your IP address and browser user-agent to the organisation concerned, exactly as visiting their own website would. Klaxon sends them nothing else about you and receives nothing back about you.

• United States Geological Survey — earthquake data, on every page that shows quakes. When the volcano layer is open, the browser also fetches USGS volcano notices (HANS) for the United States, Alaska, and Hawaii.
• Esri — the dark basemap tiles beneath the map. When the fire layer is open, the browser also fetches the US NIFC incident list from ArcGIS.
• NASA — wildfire imagery (GIBS) and event listings (EONET), when those layers are displayed.
• The GDELT Project — fallback news headlines if Google News cannot be loaded. In that case your browser contacts GDELT directly.
• Netlify — our host, which serves the files and, like any web server, processes the request including your IP address in order to deliver them. When the volcano layer is open, it also fetches the public MAGMA Indonesia eruption list from PVMBG and the GDACS volcano event list so those eruptions show current times. When the fire layer is open, it fetches the NSW RFS Fires Near Me list and VicEmergency events. When the news page is open, it fetches the public Google News RSS feed so headlines can be shown.

That is the complete list. Web fonts and the mapping library were previously loaded from Google and a public CDN; both are now served from klaxon.live, so using the site no longer discloses your address to companies with no role in hazard data.

What Klaxon does not do

• No advertising, and no advertising networks.
• No analytics, page-view counting, session recording or heatmaps.
• No cookies set by Klaxon.
• No selling, sharing or brokering of data — there is nothing to sell, except the email addresses of people who asked to be on the waitlist, which we will not sell.
• No email address collected unless you join the Pro waitlist.

The Pro waitlist

If you submit the form on the Pro page, the only things we take are your email address and the language of the page you submitted from. That list is stored by Netlify, who already hosts the site, so we can tell you when watch zones are ready. We will not add you to any other list, and we will not use the address for advertising. To be removed, write to klaxonlive@myyahoo.com.

If you never join the waitlist, nothing described in the rest of this page changes for you.

When Klaxon Pro arrives

The watch-zone notifications described on the about page cannot work the way the rest of Klaxon does. Sending you a message requires a server that knows which zone you want watched and where to deliver the message, and taking payment requires a payment processor. None of that exists yet. The waitlist is the only contact detail collected today.

This page will be updated before accounts or payments are switched on rather than after, and it will state exactly what is stored, for how long, and which processors are involved.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Any material change — anything altering what is collected or who receives it — will also be noted on the about page.