Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 July 2026.

FireWatcher is a free wildfire map for Central Oregon, run by one person. There is no advertising on it and nothing on this site is funded by selling information about the people who read it. This page describes exactly what the site stores, what it deliberately does not, and how to have your data removed.

There is no analytics or advertising tracking

The site loads no analytics script, no advertising pixel and no session recorder. There is no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel and no third-party tag manager anywhere in the pages served from this domain. Nobody is building a profile of your visits here, because the code that would do it was never added.

Using the map

The whole dashboard is free and needs no account. If you never sign up, the site stores no personal information about you at all. Our server keeps ordinary web-server logs, and requests to the site's own API carry your IP address so that per-IP rate limits can stop one visitor from overwhelming the feeds for everyone else.

Because the map draws data from public sources, your browser fetches map tiles, terrain, fire-camera images and aircraft photos directly from those providers — currently OpenFreeMap, Amazon S3 (terrain), AlertWest, ODOT TripCheck and Planespotters. Those hosts see your IP address the same way any site you visit does. They receive no account information from us, and location queries our server makes on your behalf are anonymous. The map library itself is served from this site, so no third party sees you load it.

Accounts, which are optional

• An account stores the email address and password you sign up with. The password is kept only as a salted hash, never in plain text and never in a form we can read.
• If you set a custom location, that latitude and longitude is stored with your account.
• A session cookie keeps you logged in for 30 days. It holds a random token — not your password, not your email. It is marked HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, so it is not readable by scripts and is not sent from other sites.

Donations

Donations are processed entirely by Stripe. Your card number never reaches our server and we could not store it if we wanted to. We keep only Stripe's customer identifier and the status of the payment, which is what lets us recognise a receipt if you write in about one.

The thank-you wall

If you post a note to the crews, we store the message, the name you choose to attach (which may be blank) and the IP address it came from. The IP is kept only to block abuse; it is never displayed, never published and is not shown on the public wall. Nothing appears on the wall until it has been read and approved.

Retention

Account data is kept for as long as your account exists, and sessions expire after 30 days. Aircraft flight trails are stored only in your own browser's local storage, never on our servers, and are pruned automatically after two hours.

Your rights

Email karmaproto5@gmail.com to request a copy of your data or the deletion of your account. See also our Terms of Service, which lists the public data sources this site depends on and explains why the map must not be used for evacuation decisions.