Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

The short version. This site has no accounts, no ads, no tracking cookies and no advertising or profiling trackers. If you only look at the weather, nothing about you is stored by us. If you choose to turn on alerts or reports, we store a small record so we can send them (see "Alerts and reports" below). To show you weather, your browser contacts other services directly, and they can see your IP address and the place you ask about. Everything is explained below.

Who runs this site

Hazards Now is run by Seth Machen. Contact: mach.projectlab@gmail.com.

What we do not do

We do not have accounts, logins, comments or contact forms, so we do not collect names, emails or passwords. The only information we ever store is the optional alerts record described below.
We do not show ads, use advertising or social-media trackers, or sell or share your information.
We do not set cookies.
We do not ask for or use your device's GPS location. You type a place or pick one, or click on the map.

What is saved on your own device

The site saves a few settings in your browser's local storage so it works the way you left it. This stays on your device and is not sent to us. You can clear it at any time in your browser settings.

What	Why
Your units (°F or °C)	To remember your choice
Your chosen map background	To remember your choice
The last place you looked at	To open the site where you left off
Places you saved	To show your saved places
If you turn on alerts: an ID and a private key	So this device can change or cancel its alerts
A small summary of local weather history	To load faster for 12 hours

What your browser sends to other services

Because the site runs in your browser, your browser requests data from the services below. Each service can see your IP address, your browser type, the address of this site, and the request itself, which usually includes the coordinates of the place you are viewing. We do not receive or store this information, and these services have their own privacy practices.

Service	Used for	What it receives
National Weather Service and other NOAA services (weather.gov, noaa.gov)	Forecasts, current conditions, alerts, radar-related data, river gauges, history, storm outlooks, air quality, hurricanes	Place coordinates
NIFC and the U.S. Drought Monitor (hosted on ArcGIS Online by Esri)	Wildfire locations and perimeters, drought maps	Map area or place coordinates
USGS (earthquake.usgs.gov)	Earthquake locations and magnitudes	Nothing beyond the request itself
Open-Meteo	The forecast layers on the weather map	Coordinates of the map area you are viewing
OpenStreetMap Nominatim	Finding a place when you search	The text you search for
USGS, OpenStreetMap and Iowa State University map tiles	Map backgrounds and radar images	The map area you are viewing

Alerts and reports (optional)

You can ask this site to send notifications to your phone or browser: alerts when something important happens near a place you choose, and daily or weekly weather reports. This is off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time.

What we store when you turn it on:

The notification address your browser gives us (a web address and encryption keys that belong to your device's push service, such as Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft). This is how a notification reaches you. It is not your name or email.
The place you picked, rounded to about 1 km, its National Weather Service zone and time zone.
Your choices: which kinds of alerts, the report schedule and time.
A random ID, the date you signed up, and a record of what we last told you, so you do not get the same alert twice.

What we do not store: your name, email address, phone number, exact location or device location. To slow down abuse we keep a scrambled (salted hash) version of your IP address for one day. It cannot be turned back into your IP address.

How long we keep it: until you unsubscribe or your device's push service tells us the address is no longer valid. When you unsubscribe, the record is deleted right away. Unsubscribe on the alerts page of this site, or turn off notifications for this site in your browser or phone settings, which also stops delivery.

Who else is involved: Cloudflare stores the record (in its database) and runs the sign-up bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile, which looks at signals from your browser to tell people from bots). Your device's push service delivers the notifications. Notification contents are encrypted for your device. We never sell or share this information, and we use it only to send what you asked for.

Hosting and visit counts

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes visitors' IP addresses to deliver pages and keeps standard server logs. We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits (how many people visit, when, from which country and on what type of device). According to Cloudflare, it does not use cookies or local storage and does not fingerprint or track you across other sites. We do not record which places you look up.

Children

This site is a general weather service and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Your choices

Clear the site's local storage in your browser to remove your saved settings and places.
Use your browser's privacy settings, a VPN or a content blocker to limit what other services see.

Visitors outside the United States

The site is intended for U.S. weather and uses U.S. services. If you visit from elsewhere, your requests are sent to those services in the United States. We use only the minimum needed to show you the weather you asked for.

Changes

If this policy changes, we will update the date above. If the site ever adds accounts, ads or other tracking, or starts collecting anything new, this policy will be updated first.

Contact

Questions about privacy: mach.projectlab@gmail.com.