Privacy policy

What we never do

• No tracking or locating of private individuals — ever, under any request.
• No publishing of private addresses, phone numbers, or non-public personal data.
• No sale of visitor data. There is nothing meaningful to sell.

What we do collect

• Preferences on your device. Theme choice (dark/light) is stored in your browser's localStorage. It never leaves your device.
• Aggregate analytics (optional). Google Analytics 4 is disabled by default. When enabled, it collects standard, aggregate usage statistics under our GA4 ID, subject to Google's terms.
• Content you submit. Contact-form submissions are used to prioritise research and corrections — nothing else.
• Your email address, if you subscribe. The newsletter signup in the footer asks for an email address and nothing else. It is used only to send the newsletter; it is never sold, rented or added to any other list, and every message carries a one-click unsubscribe. The mailing list is operated by Buttondown, a third-party email service in the United States, so subscribing transfers your address to them for that purpose. If you never subscribe, we never hold your email address at all — the search box, the map and the comparison bench send nothing.

Cookies

This site can operate with zero cookies. See the cookie policy for the exact list.

Advertising

WhereIsAtlas displays advertising served by third-party ad networks, including Google AdSense. Ads are served as non-personalised ads by default: they are not selected using your previous browsing, and we pass no personal data to the ad network. If you opt in through the consent banner, ads may be personalised on the basis of your prior visits to this or other websites.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites. That is how personalised advertising works, and it is off unless you opt in. See how Google uses cookies in advertising.
• Even non-personalised ads use cookies or similar storage, for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to detect and prevent fraud and abuse.
• Visitors in the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown a Google-certified consent message before any personalised advertising is served, and can change that choice at any time.
• You can opt out of personalised advertising across all sites that use Google's ad technology in Google Ad Center, or through your browser's ad settings.
• The cookie policy lists the advertising storage in use and lets you change your choice.

How we use sources

Every entry is written by us, in our own words, from the material listed in its sources. We read sources to establish facts; we do not copy their text. Where we quote a source directly we mark the quotation, keep it short, and attribute it — that is what a citation is for.

Some of the material we consult is openly licensed and some is not. We treat both the same way: cite, summarise, quote sparingly. We do not republish other people's articles, theses, papers or datasets, in whole or in substance, and we do not mirror archived pages — we link to them. If you hold rights in something we have cited and you would like it handled differently, write to us and we will act on it.

Third-party links

Sources link outward (Wikipedia, wire services, official records). Those sites have their own policies; we cite them, we don't speak for them.

WhereIsAtlas is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. When you buy through one of our "go deeper" book or product links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. We only recommend works we genuinely cite or believe in.

Contact

Privacy questions: [email protected].