Privacy

Townwatch has no accounts and keeps nothing about you.

What Townwatch stores

Only public records and the summaries made from them: official agendas, the place names people look up, and the cost of each analysis. None of it is linked to a person.

What Townwatch does not store

No name, no email, no account, no address, no history of what you read. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Your address

“Near you” can use your street address. Your browser sends it directly to the US Census Bureau geocoder, a free public service, which returns a map position. Townwatch’s servers never receive the address or the position. Distances are computed in your browser and forgotten when you leave the page.

If you prefer, drop a pin on a map instead: no address is used at all. The map images come from OpenFreeMap, which sees which area of the map is displayed, like any map service.

Places named in agendas

To place agenda items on the map, Townwatch looks up the roads and sites named in the public record with OpenStreetMap Nominatim. These lookups contain public record text only, never anything about you.

Limits on new places

To keep the service free, each visitor can start one new place per day. To count this without knowing who you are, Townwatch keeps a scrambled code made from your network address and a random value that changes every day. The code cannot be turned back into the address and is deleted after 24 hours.

Hosting

The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps standard technical logs (such as IP addresses) for a short time to run and protect the service. Townwatch does not read or keep them.

Sources

Briefings are made only from documents published by governments, school districts and their official agenda platforms. The official record always prevails over the summary.