Privacy
What happens to the address you type
You are looking up your own home. That is about as personal as a search gets, and a site that asks for it should be specific about where it goes. This page is the specific version, including the parts that are inconvenient to admit.
The short version. There are no accounts, no ads, no trackers that follow you elsewhere, and nothing about you is sold or shared with anyone. Your saved places and any photographs you add never leave your own browser. The one thing worth reading carefully is the next section, because the address you type does leave this server — it has to, to become a location on a map.
The address you type goes to OpenStreetMap
To turn "12 Example Street, Lismore" into a point on the earth, Watermark sends that text to Nominatim, the geocoding service run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. There is no way to do this without sending it somewhere, and OpenStreetMap is the option that is not a commercial data broker.
It is sent from this server, not from your browser, so OpenStreetMap receives the address text and this server's IP address — not yours. It is covered by the OpenStreetMap Foundation privacy policy. Watermark does not keep a copy of what you typed.
If you would rather not send an address at all, you do not have to: you can click or tap directly on the map instead, and nothing but a coordinate is ever used.
What this server writes down
The web server keeps an ordinary access log, as almost every web server does. For this site it is deliberately weakened first:
| Recorded | Detail | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| A partial IP address | The last part is discarded before anything is written to disk —
203.0.113.47 is stored as 203.0.113.0. This is done
because the rest of the log line contains the coordinates you looked up, and
a full IP beside those would be a record of who asked about which house. |
14 days |
| The page or API path requested | For a lookup this includes the latitude and longitude — but not a street address, and not a name. | 14 days |
| Time, response code, browser version | Standard server log fields. | 14 days |
After 14 days the log is deleted by rotation. Nothing is copied out of it, aggregated into a profile, or joined to anything else.
The satellite answers are stored, but not against you
What Geoscience Australia and the Bureau say about a piece of ground is stored permanently, so the next person asking about that ground gets an instant answer instead of another request to a public agency. Those records are keyed to a 30-metre grid square. They contain no IP address, no session, and nothing that links a square to whoever looked it up.
Things that stay in your browser and never reach this server
- Places you save to your watchlist.
- Photographs you add to a place. These are held in your browser's own storage as images on your device. They are never uploaded. There is an export button so you can get them out; there is no import path into this server because there is no server-side store for them to go into.
- Your chosen language.
Clearing your browser's site data for this site removes all of it, permanently. Nobody else has a copy, including me.
Third parties your browser contacts
Loading a map means loading map images, and those come from other people's servers. Those servers see your IP address, as they would for any image on any website.
| Who | Why | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| CARTO | The base map — streets, coastlines, labels | Your IP, and which map tiles you viewed |
| Geoscience Australia | The satellite water imagery drawn over the map | Your IP, and which tiles you viewed |
| Histats | A visitor counter, so I can tell whether anyone is using this | Your IP, the page, and the site you arrived from |
Histats is the only one of the three that is there for my benefit rather than yours. It is a single one-pixel image rather than a tracking script, it sets nothing that follows you to other websites, and if it ever becomes more than a counter it will be removed. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no social media tracker, and no fingerprinting.
Cookies
Watermark sets no cookies of its own. It has no login, so it has nothing to keep you signed in to. You may see no cookie banner here for the simple reason that there is nothing to consent to.
Children
This site is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone of any age.
Your rights, and the honest limit of them
Australian privacy law gives you rights to access and correct personal information held about you. The honest position here is that there is almost nothing to access: no account, no profile, no record of your searches, and a partial IP address that is gone within a fortnight and cannot be matched back to you anyway. If you want that fortnight of partial log lines removed sooner, ask and I will remove them.
If a figure about your property is wrong, that is a different and more useful request — see about, and please tell me.
Contact
Email siroj.8b@gmail.com for anything on this page, or to ask for something to be deleted or corrected.
If this page ever changes in a way that matters, the change will be described here rather than quietly swapped in.