How City Limits handles your location
Short version: your position is used to name the town you're in, and is not kept.
What is sent, and when
- Your browser shares your position with this page only after you allow it. You can withdraw that permission in your browser at any time.
- The page sends a position to the City Limits server only when you first open it and when you leave the boundary of the place you're in, not continuously.
- While you're moving at more than walking pace toward a boundary, it may also send a point a short way ahead of you on your path, so the next town's name is ready the moment you cross. Near a boundary it may also send a request that carries no position at all, to wake the server up beforehand.
- Each position is rounded to about 11 metres before it leaves your device, and travels in the body of an encrypted request, not in a web address.
Who sees it
- Microsoft Azure Maps receives the rounded position only for places outside the US, or when the Census service doesn't answer.
- The U.S. Census Bureau (its public TIGERweb map service) receives the rounded position of lookups in or near the US, to find the legal city, town or county, and the state.
- Cloudflare and Microsoft Azure carry and host the site, as for any website.
What is kept
- The server doesn't store positions or place names, and doesn't write them to logs.
- For US places, which come from public Census data, the server keeps a recent answer in memory for up to an hour, so a nearby request can be answered without asking again. It is not tied to you. Answers from Azure Maps are not kept.
- Service telemetry records that a request happened and how long it took, with an approximate city derived from your IP address. The IP address itself is masked and not kept.
- A daily count of map lookups is kept to cap costs. It holds a number, nothing about you.
- If you turn on Keep history on this device, the places you pass through are kept in your browser: town names and times, never positions. They are never sent anywhere, and Clear history deletes them. Your settings (history, chime, soft tone, spoken names, town-change transition, keep screen on) are stored the same way.
- If you turn on Speak town names, your device's built-in voice reads the place name aloud. City Limits uses only voices that run on your device, so the names aren't sent anywhere for speaking.
- Requests for the files that search engines and other automated readers fetch (such as
robots.txt,sitemap.xmland/.well-known/), and probes for common attack paths, are logged at Cloudflare's edge with the IP address and browser identification, and deleted after 10 days. A summary without the IP address (the path, the country, and whether the requester is a known search engine) is kept for about three months. Visiting a page or looking up a place is not in either.
What City Limits doesn't do
- No accounts, no cookies, no advertising, no analytics scripts.
- No street addresses are shown or requested.
- Your location history is never collected, sold or shared. The optional History list exists only in your browser.