Privacy

The address you type

When you search for your property, the address goes two places. First to a geocoding service (Nominatim, run by OpenStreetMap, or Mapbox) to turn it into a latitude and longitude. Then the house number and street name are sent to our own parcel lookup, so we can pick the right lot out of the county records instead of guessing from the coordinates.

Those two requests are logged differently, and the difference is worth spelling out. The geocoder gets the address in the web address of the request, so it lands in that company's logs the same way every URL does — that is a third party, and its policy governs, not ours. Our own parcel lookup gets it in the body of the request instead, which is not part of the URL, so what our host writes down for that call is your IP address, the time, your browser's user-agent string and the fact that a lookup happened — not the address itself.

That is a real difference, and it is not the same as us being unable to see it. The address is in a request our server handles, so our code sees it in transit and a future version of that code could write it down; we don't, and there is no database, no profile and no name to attach it to, because there are no accounts. Vercel, our host, still logs the request itself under its own retention policy, and those records are copied onward — see “Third parties” below. We'd rather say all of that plainly than tell you nothing is stored.

Your fence plan

The plan you draw is saved in your browser's local storage on your device. Two things take it off your device, and both are things you ask for: creating a share link, which encodes the plan into a URL you choose who to send to, and asking us to post you a printed copy, which sends us that same link. Nothing else does.

A share link is self-contained: the whole plan — including the owner name, phone number and address you typed into the permit fields — is packed into the part of the link after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server, so opening one does not tell us anything and does not put your details in our logs. It does put them in the link itself, which means in your browser history, in whatever you paste it into, and in the hands of everyone you send it to. Treat it like the plan it is.

Analytics

We count pageviews ourselves rather than through an analytics company. Opening a page sends one short message to factscore.mrcto.ai — another site we run — saying which page you opened and which page you came from. No cookies, no cross-site tracking, no advertising identifiers, and nothing about the fence you drew.

A few moments in the tool itself are counted the same way. When your permit packet PDF finishes generating, we send a short message saying that a packet was produced, which city you picked, and whether county lot lines were found for your lot. We also send the name of the step alone when a lot is located, when a fence is finished, when the download menu is opened, when a packet is asked for, and when the print dialog is opened — plus, for the lot, whether lot lines were found, which county dataset answered, and which US state your search resolved to, as a two-letter code and nothing finer. And when you download the filled-in city permit form or the neighbour consent letter, we send which of the two files it was, and the city for the permit form.

None of those messages carries your address, your name, the fence you drew, or the parcel number, and none of them carries any of the PDFs — those are assembled in your browser and never sent anywhere. We count these because otherwise we cannot tell the difference between someone who got a plot plan, someone who tried and stopped, and someone who only looked at the page.

That message carries a marker we set on your device, so it is worth naming precisely: the first time you visit we generate a random identifier and keep it in your browser's local storage, so that several pages in one sitting, and a visit next week, count as one person rather than as strangers. It is a random number attached to nothing else — not your address, not your plan, not an account — and because it is stored per site it cannot be used to follow you between ours. Clearing your site data deletes it.

If you ask us to post you a copy

After your permit packet is generated, we offer to print it, write you a note by hand and put it in the post. That offer is the only part of this site that asks for a postal address, and it is entirely optional — everything works without it.

If you send it, three things travel: the name you typed, the mailing address you typed, and a link that rebuilds your plan so we can print the same packet you have. Be clear about that third one, because it is the whole plan. It is the same self-contained share link described further up this page, and this is the one place on the site where you hand it to us rather than choosing who to send it to — so what lands in our inbox includes the fence you drew and every measurement on it, plus the owner name, phone number and property address you typed into the permit fields. What does not travel is the PDF: we rebuild the packet from the link instead of receiving your file. Your analytics message records only that a printed copy was asked for and which city's rules it was built against, which is what this page describes when a printed copy is asked for.

Those details arrive as one email in our inbox and go nowhere else. There is no database behind that form, no list you are added to, and no follow-up — we use the address to post your packet and then it is just an old email. If you would rather it were not, reply to it and we will delete it.

Third parties

The map view loads satellite imagery tiles from Esri. Geocoding uses Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) or Mapbox — whichever one runs your search receives the address you typed, in the URL, and logs it. The site is hosted on Vercel, which logs every request to it — the URL that was requested, your IP address, the time and your user-agent — and those log records are forwarded to Datadog, a log-monitoring service we use to watch for errors and abuse. Datadog therefore holds a copy of the same request records Vercel does, under its own retention terms. Each of these companies sees the requests your browser makes and handles them under its own privacy policy, not ours.

What we never do

No accounts, no sign-up, no selling or sharing of data, no ads.

Questions

Email t@mrcto.ai.