← Landfall

Privacy

Last updated October 9, 2026

Landfall has no accounts and is free to use, paid for by ads from Google. To tell you what a storm means for your home, it has to look up your address with a few outside services. Here's exactly what goes where.

Your address

As you type, the letters go to Google's Places service to suggest addresses. When you pick one, Google returns its map coordinates. If you type an address and press search without picking a suggestion, it may also go to the U.S. Census Bureau's address lookup. "Use my location" asks your browser for your position; it goes to Google only to turn it into a street address.

Your coordinates

To build your briefing, the coordinates of your home (not your name or anything else) are sent to public data services: the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service and its Weather Prediction Center and river forecasts, FEMA's flood maps and shelter list, the U.S. Geological Survey's elevation service and land cover map, your state or county's evacuation-zone map, and OpenStreetMap's Overpass service for nearby features. Each of those has its own privacy policy.

A briefing's web address holds a sealed code instead of your address or coordinates, so the page address, your browser history and ad code never show where you live. You can still bookmark or share it, and anyone you send the link to will see the briefing, address included.

What we keep

• Our servers keep recent briefings and the data behind them in memory and in a cache on disk for up to a week, so reloading is fast and we don't overload public services. These are keyed by coordinates, not by who asked.
• Our hosting provider (Fly.io) keeps standard server logs, including your IP address and the pages requested, for a short time. We leave out what you type into the search box. We use these logs to stop abuse and fix problems.
• We count visits: page views, searches, briefings, which storm, the site that sent you and your screen size. No IP address, location or cookie goes into these counts. Your browser keeps the date of your last visit so we can tell new visitors from returning ones, and that date never leaves it except as a yes or no.
• Your preparation checklist is saved only in your own browser. It never reaches us.

We don't sell or rent any of this, and we don't build profiles of visitors.

Ads and cookies

Landfall shows ads through Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies and similar technology to serve ads based on your visits to this and other websites, and to measure them. Google's ad code can see the address of the page you're on. For a briefing that's the sealed code, not your location.

You can read how Google uses information in ads, turn off personalized ads in Google's ad settings, or opt out of many ad networks' cookies at aboutads.info.

Maps

The map is drawn with Google Maps tiles, loaded directly from Google by your browser. Google's privacy policy applies to those requests.

Questions

Landfall is run by Dark Matter Labs. Write to ander@dark.tech with any question or to ask about data we hold.