Privacy policy
Last updated: 20 October 2026
alerts.live is a free, informational live map of protests, strikes, road closures and street incidents. This page explains exactly what personal data the site processes, why, for how long, who receives it, and your rights under the GDPR. alerts.live offers optional user accounts (for access to historic alerts), has no advertising and no third-party analytics or tracking tools; it uses its own self-hosted audience measurement described below.
1. Who is responsible
The data controller is the operator of alerts.live (the site owner). The operator’s legal identity and a dedicated contact address for privacy requests will be published on this page. Until then, see section 9 for how to exercise your rights.
2. In short
- Live alerts sign-up: we store the email address or phone number you give us and your choices, only to send you the alerts you asked for (your consent). Unsubscribing deletes them.
- Reports (“Report” button): what you type, the place and optional photos are published on the map and in the public API. We never publish who sent them.
- Anti-abuse and confidence score: we keep salted hashes (one-way, keyed codes) of your IP address, of your network and of a random device identifier. The only raw IP addresses we store are those of “I see this too” clicks (anti-abuse, deleted after 90 days, see 3.4).
- No cookies. Your browser’s local storage keeps your language, a random device identifier and a few display settings.
3. What we collect, why, and how long we keep it
3.1 “Get Live alerts” subscriptions
| Data | Channel (email, SMS or WhatsApp); your email address or phone number; language; chosen cities and/or countries and incident types; date and time of your consent; sign-up date; whether you confirmed; two random tokens (confirmation link and unsubscribe link); a salted hash of your IP address. |
|---|---|
| Why | To send you the alerts you selected; to confirm the subscription by double opt-in (email); the IP hash limits abuse (at most 5 sign-up attempts per hour from the same address). Alerts are only sent to confirmed contacts. |
| Legal basis | Your consent (GDPR art. 6(1)(a)), given with the checkbox in the sign-up window. You can withdraw it at any time. |
| How long | Until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion. Unsubscribing deletes your subscription and any message not yet sent, immediately. Copies remain in our backups for a limited time only: daily subscriber backups are kept for 30 days and nightly database backups for 14 days, after which they are overwritten. A log of messages already sent (address, subject, text — including the operator’s daily summaries listing new sign-ups) is kept on the server and is deleted on request. |
| Who receives it | The operator: the subscriber list is available to the site owner, who receives (once email sending is active) a daily summary of new sign-ups (contact, channel, choices, consent time) and can export the list. It is not sold, rented or shared with anyone else, apart from the message-delivery provider needed to send you the alerts (see section 4). |
Current status: no email, SMS or WhatsApp provider is connected yet, so no message is sent at the moment; sign-ups are stored and the confirmation message is queued until sending is enabled. WhatsApp and SMS delivery is not active.
3.2 Reports (“Report” button)
| Data | Incident type; a precise location, which is mandatory: your live position (browser geolocation, only when you press the button), a street address you pick, or a point clicked on the map, with the city, zip code and country filled in from it. The exact point (rounded to about 10 m), its accuracy and the address are kept internally for moderation only; the public map shows the report on a grid of about 300 m, never your exact position; estimated size and danger level; your note (max 300 characters); an optional link; date and time; and, kept internally only, salted hashes of your IP address, of your network (IPv4 /24 or IPv6 /64) and of your device identifier (see 3.5). |
|---|---|
| Why | To show the incident to the public (map, city pages, statistics, public API, RSS/Atom feeds, webhooks and alerts); to compute the confidence score: confirmations only count when they come from different networks/devices than the reporter, bursts and duplicate texts from the same network are penalised, and past reports from the same hashed identity build a reputation; to rate-limit reports (one per 5 minutes per address). |
| Legal basis | Our legitimate interest (GDPR art. 6(1)(f)) in providing reliable public safety information and preventing fake reports and abuse. |
| What is public | The report itself (type, place, size, danger, note, link, time, confidence score). A report with low confidence (below 50/100) is labelled “unconfirmed / possibly fake”, is hidden by default and excluded from feeds, alerts and statistics, but can still be displayed with the “Unconfirmed reports” switch and requested through the public API. The hashes are never published. |
| How long | A report disappears from the live map 12 hours after its last sighting. It is then kept in the history (statistics; public API up to 30 days back) with no automatic deletion. We delete a report on request. |
Please do not put personal data in notes or photos (names, faces, licence plates, phone numbers). Reports of police positions are rejected automatically.
3.3 Witness photos (optional, max 3 per report)
Your browser resizes each photo (max 1280 px) and re-encodes it, and our server additionally strips all metadata (EXIF, GPS position, XMP, comments). Photos are stored on our server with the time and a salted hash of your IP address, and are shown publicly only after moderation, labelled “Photo by a witness (unverified)”. Anyone can flag a published photo; a photo flagged twice is withdrawn until reviewed. Legal basis: legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)). Kept until deleted by moderation or on request.
3.4 Confirmations (“Confirm” button)
We store the event concerned, the time and salted hashes of your IP address, network and device identifier, so that each person counts only once and the reporter cannot confirm their own report. Legal basis: legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)). Kept with the event history.
In addition, every click on “I see this too” is logged with the event, the time, your IP address, the hashed device identifier and your browser’s user agent, so that coordinated fake confirmations can be detected and blocked. Legal basis: legitimate interest in preventing abuse (art. 6(1)(f)). Only the administrator can see this log, and entries are deleted automatically after 90 days.
3.5 Device identifier
On your first visit your browser generates a random identifier and keeps it in its local storage (key dev). It is sent with reports and confirmations (HTTP header X-Device); the server stores only a salted HMAC hash of it. It is used only for the confidence score and abuse prevention, never for advertising or to follow you across other sites. You can delete it at any time by clearing this site’s data in your browser.
3.6 Approximate location
- When you open the home page without choosing a city, our server looks up the approximate location of your IP address with an IP-geolocation service (ipwho.is, or ipapi.co as a fallback) to centre the map on the nearest event. Your IP address is sent to that service; the result (rounded to about 10 km) is kept only in the server’s memory for up to 24 hours and is never written to disk.
- If you press “Near me” and allow it in your browser, your position rounded to about 1 km is sent to find the nearest event. It is not stored.
Legal basis: legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)) in showing relevant events. You can avoid the IP lookup by opening a city page directly (for example /en/paris).
3.7 Rate limiting and security
To limit abuse we keep salted hashes of IP addresses with a timestamp; entries are purged automatically once older than 1 hour (reports, sign-ups, photos, photo flags) or 24 hours (API-key creation). Anonymous API requests are counted per hashed IP in memory only (1 minute). The application log contains operational messages (data collection, errors) without IP addresses, and the web server does not keep access logs for alerts.live.
Audience statistics (self-hosted, no cookies, no third-party tracker): for each page view we record the time, the page, the referring website (domain only), the country and the device type (desktop, mobile, tablet). To count unique visitors per day we store a hash of your IP address and browser user agent keyed with a salt that changes every day, so visits cannot be linked from one day to the next and the raw IP address is not stored. Legal basis: legitimate interest in measuring the audience (art. 6(1)(f)). Kept 400 days.
Session analytics (self-hosted, no cookies): to understand how the site is used we also record, per browser-tab session (a random identifier kept in your browser's session storage), the IP address, the approximate city and country derived from it, browser, operating system and screen size, the referring website and any utm_ campaign parameters, the pages viewed, the active time spent, and the position of clicks on the page (never the content of forms or anything you type). Legal basis: legitimate interest in improving the service and preventing abuse (art. 6(1)(f)). Kept 90 days, then deleted automatically. Not shared with anyone.
Contact form (/contact): we store your email address, your message and, if you give them, your phone number and name, with the time, your language and a salted hash of your IP address (anti-spam: at most 3 messages per hour). They are used only to answer you, are forwarded to the operator’s mailbox once an email provider is connected, and are deleted after 12 months. Legal basis: your request (art. 6(1)(b)) and legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)).
3.8 Developer API (/developers)
When you create a free API key we store only a hash of the key, its first characters, the optional label and the optional email address you enter (used only to contact you about the API), the creation date, last use and request count. Webhooks store the URL, a signing secret and your filters. Kept until you ask for deletion (webhooks can be deleted through the API).
3b. Accounts and payments
Account. If you create an account we store your email address, a salted scrypt hash of your password (never the password itself), the cities, countries and continents you pick, your plan, the date of creation and last login, and session records (a hash of the session token and the IP address of the login, kept until the session expires, max. 30 days). Purpose: giving you access to the historic alerts you are entitled to (contract, GDPR art. 6(1)(b)). We use your email only for account messages (confirmation, password reset, billing); never for marketing without separate consent. Kept until you delete the account (Account page) — then removed immediately, except billing records we must keep by law.
Payments. Paid plans are processed by Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe Ltd., Ireland), which acts as an independent controller for payment data. alerts.live never receives or stores card numbers; we keep only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, the plan quantities, status and renewal date. Invoices and accounting records are kept for the legally required period (generally 10 years). Stripe’s privacy policy: stripe.com/privacy.
Account emails are sent through our email provider [EMAIL PROVIDER — to be provided]. Operator of the service: [LEGAL ENTITY NAME, address, registration number — to be provided]. See also the Terms.
4. Service providers and third parties
- Hosting: DigitalOcean — our server is in Frankfurt, Germany (EU). All data above is stored there; nightly database backups are kept on the same server, access-restricted.
- Message delivery (not active yet): when enabled, emails will go through an email (SMTP) provider and SMS/WhatsApp messages through Twilio (WhatsApp messages are carried by WhatsApp/Meta). They receive only your contact and the message. This page will name the email provider once it is connected.
- IP geolocation: ipwho.is and ipapi.co receive your IP address as described in 3.6 (also used to find the country of a page view; only the country is kept).
- Address search for reports: the address you type, or your position when you use “Use my live location” or click the map, is sent by our server (not your browser, so not your IP address) to OpenStreetMap Nominatim, or Photon (Komoot) as a fallback, to find the street, city, zip code and country. Results are cached for 30 days.
- Automatic translation: titles of events (including the text of published reports), news headlines and public social-media posts are sent — without any identifier about you — to Google Translate (translate.googleapis.com), public Lingva instances and MyMemory. Translations are cached on our server.
- Map tiles: your browser loads the map images directly from the OpenStreetMap Foundation tile servers (tile.openstreetmap.org), which therefore see your IP address and the area you view. The map library (Leaflet) is served by alerts.live itself.
- Videos: an embedded YouTube video is loaded from youtube-nocookie.com only when you press play.
- News and social posts: our server collects public news articles, YouTube videos and public Mastodon posts about incidents; their preview images are copied to our server so that your browser does not contact those sites when viewing them. Links you click open the original sites, which have their own policies.
We do not sell personal data, and we use no advertising, third-party analytics or social-media tracking tools.
5. Transfers outside the EU
Some providers listed above (for example Google, Twilio and the IP-geolocation services) may process data outside the European Union. Only the data described for each provider is sent to them.
6. Cookies and local storage
alerts.live sets one cookie only if you log in: al_sess, a strictly necessary, httpOnly session cookie (30 days, deleted when you log out). Without an account it sets no cookies. Your browser’s local storage keeps: lang (your language), dev (the random device identifier, see 3.5), confirmed (the events you already confirmed, so the button stays disabled) and unc (whether unconfirmed reports are shown). These stay on your device; only the device identifier is sent to us. You can delete them by clearing this site’s data in your browser.
7. Security
The site is served only over HTTPS. IP addresses and device identifiers are stored only as hashes keyed with a secret, administrative functions require a secret token, and backups are readable only by the server administrator. Note that hashed identifiers are pseudonymous data, which the GDPR still treats as personal data.
8. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to: access your data; rectification; erasure; restriction of processing; objection to processing based on our legitimate interest (art. 21); portability of the data you gave us; and to withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting earlier processing. You can also lodge a complaint with the French data protection authority, the CNIL (www.cnil.fr/fr/plaintes), or with the supervisory authority of your country.
9. How to exercise your rights
- Alert subscribers: every confirmation and alert message contains a personal unsubscribe link; opening it deletes your subscription immediately.
- Other requests (access, deletion of a report or photo, objection, API key): a contact address for privacy requests is being added to this page. Because we keep only hashes, we may ask you for details that let us find your data (for example the city, time and text of a report).
10. Changes
We will update this page when the way alerts.live processes data changes (for example when a message-delivery provider is connected). The date at the top shows the latest version.