Privacy
Drop the Red Dot has no accounts, no advertising, and nothing to sell. This page describes exactly what it does with the data it does touch.
The short version
- Your location is never requested unless you ask for it, by name, in the interface.
- Nothing you do here is tied to an identity, because there is no identity to tie it to.
- Analytics records which travel mode you chose. It never records where you were.
- A shared link contains only what you chose to share, and warns you first if it would carry a precise position from your device.
Location
The app asks your browser for your position in exactly three cases, all of them started by you: pressing My location, pressing Pin me, or starting navigation. Your browser or phone will ask your permission first, and you can refuse — the rest of the atlas works without it.
While navigating, your position is read continuously so the route can advance. It is used on your device to move the map and to work out the next instruction. Positions are not stored, and no history of where you have been is kept anywhere.
Coordinates are sent to this site’s own servers only as part of a request you triggered — planning a route, or naming a dropped pin — and are forwarded to the mapping services listed below to answer it. They are held briefly in memory to avoid asking the same question twice, and are never written to a database, because there is no database.
Searches
What you type into a place field is sent to this site’s servers and on to the gazetteer that answers it. It is not logged, not stored and not associated with you. Suggestions as you type come from OneMap only; Nominatim is queried only when you press Enter, which is a deliberate act and keeps this app within their usage policy.
Shared links
A link you share carries coordinates in its address, because that is how it restores the view for whoever opens it. It carries only the one thing you chose to share — a pin, or a route, or the camera — and not whatever else happened to be on screen.
If a link would contain a precise position that came from your device’s location sensor, the app says so before copying it, and offers a version rounded to about 110 metres instead. Anyone you send the link to can read those coordinates; nobody else receives them.
Analytics
This site uses Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights to count page views and measure loading performance. Both are cookieless and neither builds a profile of you or follows you to other sites.
A small number of product events are recorded so the app can be improved: which travel mode was chosen, that navigation was started or completed, that a link was shared and whether the approximate option was taken, and whether the session is running as an installed app.
No analytics event contains a location, a place name or anything you typed. Every value is one of a fixed set of words — “car”, “bus”, “exact”, “installed”. This is a deliberate constraint in the code, not a matter of policy.
Server logs
Each request to the routing and search endpoints writes one line recording which endpoint was called, how long it took, whether it succeeded, and which provider answered. These lines deliberately contain no IP address and no search text, because logs outlive the request and neither belongs in them.
To stop one runaway client exhausting the shared allowance these free services depend on, the number of recent requests from an address is counted in memory. That count is transient, is never written to disk, and disappears when the server instance recycles.
Other services this app relies on
Answering a request means passing it to one of these. Each has its own privacy policy.
Children
This is a general-purpose map. It is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.
Changes, and getting in touch
If what the app does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Questions, corrections or a request about your data: hello@sgreddot.com.
This is a plain-English description of how the app actually behaves, written to be accurate rather than to be exhaustive. It is not legal advice.