Privacy

The short version

ChattyMaps does not require an account, email address, or password. It stores the poll content people submit, anonymous browser-session identifiers, nicknames, locations, and votes so the service can create and operate shared polls. Public polls appear in Discover. Unlisted polls do not, but anyone with their link can open them.

Anonymous browser sessions

The server creates a random session identifier and stores it in a necessary, httpOnly cookie for up to one year. The cookie lets the same browser retain creator controls and its participant identity. It is not an account and does not follow you across browsers or devices. Clearing it loses those controls; there is currently no recovery process.

When you choose a country or confirm an area, a separate preference cookie remembers the two-letter country code for up to 180 days. This saves you choosing it again on future visits. You can change the country at any time; clearing this cookie resets the saved preference. It stores no precise location.

During poll creation, the URL records your country and confirmed search area so you can bookmark or share that starting point. This geography is visible to anyone with the URL and may appear in browser history. Unfinished poll wording, nicknames and shortlisted places stay in the browser draft rather than being added to the URL.

Poll information

A poll can contain its title, description, creator nickname, candidate place names, addresses and coordinates, participant nicknames, votes, visibility setting, and lifecycle dates. Do not put confidential information, someone else's personal information, or anything unlawful in a poll.

In social voting mode, participant nicknames and individual votes are visible to people who can open the poll. In aggregate-only mode, viewers see their own row and group totals, but not other individual rows.

Participants can add photos to a place or to a comment. Photos can be seen by anyone who can open the poll, whatever the voting mode. Before uploading, your browser shrinks each photo and saves it as a new image, which removes embedded camera details such as GPS location. Don't upload photos of people who haven't agreed to it. A photo is removed when its uploader, the poll creator, or ChattyMaps deletes it, and when the place, comment, or poll it belongs to is deleted.

Public and unlisted polls

Public polls can be shown on the Discover page. Unlisted polls are omitted from Discover, but they are not password-protected or access-controlled. Treat an unlisted poll URL as a shareable secret.

Service providers and logs

Cloudflare runs the application, database, and photo storage and may process request metadata such as IP addresses for delivery, security, rate limiting, and operational logs. ChattyMaps' own error and request logs are kept by Cloudflare for at most seven days. Area suggestions send the place name you type and any country filter through ChattyMaps to the Photon service operated by komoot. Confirming an area, explicit place searches, and location lookups are proxied to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service. Your browser location is requested only when you choose “Use my location”. Category browsing sends the selected category and map search bounds through ChattyMaps to Geoapify. Its privacy policy applies. The Geoapify API key stays on our server. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap. Those providers operate under their own terms and privacy practices.

If no country is already known from your draft, destination link or saved preference, Cloudflare's approximate country for your connection can suggest a starting country. You can correct it with “Change country”. This does not request device location or automatically save the estimate as your preference.

Recent maps on your device

Your browser can remember up to 20 polls and collections you create or join: their links, titles, type, whether you created them, when you visited, and the place IDs seen on that visit. This supports “Your maps” and notices about new places. This history stays in local storage on that device; it is not sent as analytics. You can remove individual entries or clear the list on “Your maps”. It does not transfer your identity or creator controls to another browser.

Product measurement

ChattyMaps keeps coarse daily counters for successfully created polls, new participants joining, polls finalized, and successful share or copy actions. Counters can be grouped into broad bands such as public or unlisted, number of candidates or participants, deadline choice, time to a decision, and the type of sharing action. The metrics table does not contain poll or participant IDs, session cookies, URLs, names, poll text, search queries, addresses, or coordinates, and it cannot reconstruct an individual journey.

Google Analytics

Every page loads Google Analytics (gtag.js). Unlike the first-party counters described above, Google Analytics sets its own cookies and receives page views, referrers, approximate location, and device and browser information for each visit, which Google processes under its own privacy policy. It is not scoped by the same forbidden-data rules that govern ChattyMaps' own metrics table, and no cookie-consent control is currently presented before it loads.

Retention and deletion

A creator can permanently delete a poll while their creator session remains available. ChattyMaps does not yet promise automatic deletion after expiry, a fixed retention period, account recovery, or restoration from deletion. A formal retention schedule and a verified operator contact must be published before the service is promoted as a public production product.

Contact and operator details

This deployment is currently an unannounced product preview. Verified operator identity, jurisdiction, postal details, and a privacy-contact channel have not yet been published. Those details are a release blocker, not information this page should invent.