Privacy

People tell us things they have not told their families. This page is the deal, in plain words, and we would rather lose a feature than break it.

What we ask for

Your account of what happened, roughly when, and roughly where. That is all that is required. An email address is optional and is used for one thing: telling you if somebody later describes something like what you saw. You can leave it blank and use the site fully.

What we never want

Do not send us your address, your full name, other people's names, licence plates, phone numbers, or anything that identifies a person who has not chosen to be here. If you do, we remove it before publishing. We are not trying to build a file on anyone.

Location

Anything shown publicly is coarsened to roughly ten kilometres. A published account says the county or the area, never the road and never the house. If a photograph carries GPS data, that data is stripped in your browser before it ever reaches us.

What happens to your account

It goes to a queue and a person reads it. Nothing you send is published automatically. Once published it becomes part of the searchable record so that other people can find it, which is the entire point of this place. If you would rather it stayed private, tell us when you send it and we will keep it out of the public record while still using it to alert you to matches.

What we log

A one-way hash of your IP address, salted, so that we can stop one person voting a thousand times and slow down spam. We cannot turn that hash back into your address. We do not use advertising trackers, we do not run third-party analytics scripts that follow you around the web, and we do not sell anything to anybody. That last one is not a marketing line: the moment this becomes a data business it stops being worth doing.

Other people

Nobody gets your email address or any way to reach you directly. If two people want to compare notes, the request goes through us, both sides have to agree, and either side can stop at any time without explaining why. See the terms for how that works.

Older accounts

Accounts dated before this site existed come from public archives kept by NUFORC and the BFRO, reproduced with attribution. If one of them is yours and you would like it gone from here, write to us and it goes, no questions and no argument.

Removing yours

Ask and we delete it: the text, the location, the email, the replies attached to it. We will confirm when it is done. We do not keep a shadow copy.

Children

This site is not intended for people under sixteen. We do not knowingly keep accounts from children, and we remove them when we find them.

Where the data lives

On servers in the United States and on our own infrastructure. If you are in Canada or the EU you have the right to see what we hold about you and to have it erased, and you can exercise that by writing to us. There is no form. It is one person reading email.