Privacy

There are no accounts, so there is nothing here that is you. We do not set analytics cookies, we do not run advertising, and we do not sell or share anything with anyone.

A spot you submit is published: its name, coordinates, category, difficulty, access type and write-up all appear on the site. A field note is published too, with whatever name you put on it. If you leave the name blank it is stored as anonymous.

Do not put anything in those fields you would not want in public. A coordinate is precise, and the pin you drop is the pin everyone sees.

We never store it. What is stored is a salted HMAC of it, which cannot be reversed back to an address without the salt, and the salt is never in the database.

That value does two jobs and no others: it caps how many submissions, notes and photos come from one place in an hour, and it counts distinct people against a report so that one person clicking ten times counts once. It is deliberately weak as identity. Everyone behind one office connection shares it, and anyone with a VPN has as many as they like.

Photos are re-encoded in your browser before anything is uploaded. That re-encode drops the GPS coordinates, the timestamp and the camera the file came from. The original file is read and discarded on your device and never reaches our server.

The site never asks for your location on load. It is read only when you press a button that says it will, and only in that tab.

On the submit form it moves the map pin, and nothing is sent until you submit. On the explore map it sorts the list by distance, and that sorting happens entirely in your browser. Your coordinates are not sent to this site or anywhere else for it. We do not write your position to storage of any kind.

A ball-meter score is stored with the salted hash described above, so that one person rates a spot once. Individual scores are readable by nobody, including us: only the average and the count are public.

A report is stored with the same hash, its reason, and anything you type in the detail box. Moderators can read the reason and the detail. Nobody can read the hash.

Two, both strictly functional, neither used for tracking:

A theme preference is kept in your browser’s local storage so the site does not flash the wrong colours on load. It never leaves your device.

A short-lived anti-bot ticket is set after you pass the Cloudflare Turnstile check, so that adding three photos and then submitting does not make you pass it four times. It lasts twenty minutes, carries no identity, and is bound to the same salted hash.

Vercel hosts the site and terminates the connection. Appwrite Cloud stores the index and the uploaded photos, in its Singapore region. Cloudflare Turnstile runs the anti-bot check on the forms. Map tiles are fetched by your browser from the tile provider configured for this deployment, which means that provider sees your IP address in the ordinary way any server does when you request a file from it.

Published spots and notes stay until they are removed by a moderator or by you asking. Rate-limit records are only consulted inside a one-hour window. Reports and ratings are kept for as long as the entry they belong to.

Because there are no accounts, we cannot look up “your” submissions. To have something removed, use the report control on the entry itself and say what it is in the detail box, or write to hello@broknowsaspot.app.

If this page changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top changes with it. broknowsaspot.app is a small project and this page is maintained by hand.