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

A person reads it before it appears anywhere. Nothing you send is published automatically. It is also checked by machine first, for phone numbers, addresses, names of other people and signs that the person writing is in distress, but that check only decides what gets looked at first: it never publishes anything on its own.

Once published it becomes part of the searchable record so that other people can find it, which is the entire point of this place. It can be pulled back out at any time, at your request or ours. If you would rather yours never appeared publicly, say so when you send it and we will keep it out of the 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. The salt changes every day, so those hashes cannot be joined up across days even by us, and we cannot turn one back into your address.

We also run Google Analytics. It sets cookies and it is Google’s, not ours, which means it can recognise you across other sites that use it. We use it to see how many people arrive, which pages they read and where they came from, and for nothing else. IP addresses are anonymised before Google receives them. We would rather tell you this plainly than let you find it in a network tab.

There is an older version of this page that said we ran no third-party analytics at all. That stopped being true on 19 August 2026 and the sentence was changed the same day, because a privacy page that lags behind what the site actually does is worse than not having one.

What we still do not do: no advertising trackers, no selling anything to anybody, ever. 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, ever. Whether another witness can message you at all is your choice: only if you ask to be reachable can somebody who thinks they saw the same thing write to you. When they do it reaches you through the site, with your name and address kept private on both sides, and you can stop and block any conversation at any moment 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. Use the contact form and one person reads it.