Privacy policy

The short version

You can use DisasterLookup.com without an account and without telling us who you are. We set no cookies of our own and keep no record of what you search. The one thing we store about people is the email address of anyone who signs up for county alerts, and we use it only to send those alerts. The site uses Google Analytics and Google Fonts, and it shows ads served by Google AdSense. The rest of this page gives the details.

Searching

The search box takes a county name or a declaration number, not a street address or ZIP code. As you type, the letters go to our own server to suggest matching counties. No outside geocoding or address service is involved. When you press Look up, what you typed goes into the page’s web address (after /search?q=); if it matches exactly one county, you are sent straight to that county’s page. Because it is in the web address, your search is visible to Cloudflare, which carries traffic to this site, to Google Analytics, which records the address of each page viewed, to Google and its advertising partners on that page, and to your own browser history.

Our server does not keep a log of which pages are requested or what is searched.

“Use my current location”

This button asks your browser for your location, and your browser asks your permission first. If you allow it, your browser rounds your latitude and longitude to four decimal places (about 10 meters) and sends them to our server. Our server asks the Federal Communications Commission’s public Area API which county that point is in, and if the FCC doesn’t answer, the U.S. Census Bureau’s public geocoder. Those requests come from our server, so the FCC or the Census Bureau sees the coordinates but not your IP address. We then send you to your county’s page. The coordinates are not stored or logged, and they do not appear in the address of the page you land on. Google Analytics records only whether the lookup worked, not where you are.

If you would rather not share your location, type your county instead.

County email alerts

On each county page you can ask to be emailed when FEMA declares a disaster that includes that county, when households there can apply to FEMA for help, and when a deadline to apply is a week away. Here is everything that involves:

• What we store. Your email address, the county you chose, a random code that makes your confirm and unsubscribe links work, and the times you signed up, confirmed, were last sent a confirmation email and (if you do) unsubscribed. We also record which alerts we have sent to each subscription and when, so nobody gets the same alert twice. We do not ask for your name or anything else.
• Confirmation first. Nothing is sent until you click the link in the confirmation email and press the button on the page it opens. If you never confirm, you get no alerts.
• Unsubscribing. Every alert has an unsubscribe link, and supporting mail apps show a one-click unsubscribe button. Either one stops that county’s alerts straight away. We keep the record marked as unsubscribed so the address isn’t mailed again; if you want it deleted entirely, email us at the address below.
• How it is sent. Alerts are sent through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), which handles your address and the message in order to deliver it. If you reply, your reply comes to our inbox.
• Bounces and complaints. If an address bounces permanently, or someone marks an alert as spam, Amazon tells our server (through Amazon SNS). We then stop every alert to that address and keep it on a do-not-send list so it can’t be signed up again. Amazon keeps a similar list of its own.
• Abuse protection. To stop automated signups, our server counts signups from each IP address for an hour, in memory. The IP address is not written down anywhere.
• What we never do. We never sell, rent, trade or share the list, and we never use it for anything except these alerts.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are visited and how people move around the site. It sets its own cookies and reports to us in aggregate; we cannot see individual visitors. You can opt out with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

Advertising

This site shows ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies, device identifiers and similar technologies to choose and measure ads, including ads based on your visits to this and other websites. What they typically receive includes your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view and the time of your visit. You can read how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

You can limit or opt out of personalized advertising here:

• Google Ads Settings (turn off personalized ads)
• aboutads.info (Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out, US)
• Your Online Choices (EU/UK)
• Network Advertising Initiative opt-out

Fonts, share images and other services

• Cloudflare carries all traffic to this site and sees the ordinary details of each request, such as IP address, browser and the page asked for.
• Google serves the fonts the pages use (Google Fonts) as well as Google Analytics.
• The FCC and the Census Bureau are asked about coordinates by our server, only when you use “use my current location,” as described above.
• Amazon SES and SNS send alert email and report bounces, only if you sign up for alerts.
• Google AdSense and its advertising partners, which serve the ads on this site, as described above.

There are no map tiles or third-party script libraries on the site. The preview images that appear when you share a page (for a county, a state or a declaration) are drawn by our own server from FEMA’s public records and contain nothing about you. When you share a link, the platform you share it on fetches that image from us.

The disaster data

The records on this site come from FEMA’s public OpenFEMA datasets and describe declarations, counties and programs, not individual people.

Your rights

If you live in California, the CCPA/CPRA gives you the right to know what personal information is collected about you, to have it deleted and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We don’t sell personal information ourselves; to opt out of personalized advertising, use the links above.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or somewhere with similar law, you have rights of access, correction, deletion and restriction under the GDPR or its local equivalent. The only personal information we hold is an alert subscriber’s email address and the details listed above. For a copy, a correction or a deletion, email us.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top will change.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: p@pwhite.org