Privacy policy
AreaProfile collects as little as it can.
No account, ever
AreaProfile has no accounts and no login. You do not give it a name, an email address or a password to use anything on the site.
Your preferences stay in your browser
Customize Your Score and the Best Places Finder store your selected priorities in your browser’s local storage, and the shortlist stores the places you have saved there — up to four. They stay on your device and are not attached to an account, because there are none. Clearing your browser data removes them.
Two pages use the address to carry what you have chosen, so that a link can share it, and that means it is sent when the page is requested. The shortlist page builds its table from the places named in its address, so opening it — your own list or a link you were sent — sends those places to the server, where they appear in the server log (below) like any other address. The link the Finder’s Copy link button gives you holds the limits you set, including a household income if you typed one, and the Finder says so beside the button; your own address bar leaves the income out, and the income is kept in this browser so a reload does not lose it. Google Analytics is told the address of the Finder and shortlist pages without anything after the question mark. The site does not connect a request to a person. Which Finder priorities are switched on is also counted anonymously (see product analytics below), one count per choice.
Server logs
The web server records standard request logs — the URL requested, a timestamp, the response status, the user agent and the requesting IP address — which are used to keep the service running and to identify abuse. They are retained for a limited period and are not used to build a profile of any individual.
Product analytics
AreaProfile records a small set of events about what happens on the site — a search was run, a profile was viewed, a ranking was opened — so that it knows which places people are looking for and which they cannot find. That is how it decides which profiles to publish next.
This first-party record is deliberately blunt. No cookie is set by it, no identifier is generated, no session is tracked, and your IP address is never written down. Timestamps are kept to the hour rather than the second, because finer timing would say more about an individual visitor than the product needs to know.
Google Analytics
Separately from the above, these pages load Google Analytics. Unlike the first-party record, it does set cookies, it does generate an identifier so that repeat visits can be recognized as the same browser, and your IP address is sent to Google, which uses it to derive an approximate location and then discards it. Google acts as a data processor for this and its own terms apply to what it retains.
It is here so that the people running AreaProfile can see which pages are found and how, which is not something the first-party record can answer. If you would rather not be counted, a browser that blocks third-party scripts, an ad blocker, or Google’s own opt-out extension will all stop it, and the site works exactly the same without it.
Search terms are stored, because a place someone looked for is exactly the signal that decides what gets built next. They are truncated, lowercased, and discarded entirely if they contain anything resembling an email address, a phone number or a URL. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, this first-party record is not written at all. Google Analytics does not act on that signal; the paragraph above explains how to stop it.
Correction reports
If you submit a correction report, AreaProfile stores what you wrote and, if you chose to provide one, your email address, so that we can follow up. The email address is optional and is used for nothing else.
What AreaProfile does not do
- Sell personal information.
- Ask for your location.
- Attempt to identify an individual visitor, or connect a visit to a named person.
- Set any cookie of its own — the cookies here belong to Google, described above and below.
Advertising
Google’s advertising script loads on every page, and two advertising positions now sit on a published profile — one after its jobs, schools and housing sections, one below the coverage note. They stay empty until Google approves the site and the units are issued, and on an unpublished place or a ZIP profile they render nothing at all. The script is a third-party script from Google either way, and it can set cookies from the moment it loads, which is why this section is written in the present tense rather than the future.
Advertising here is served by Google. Google and its partners use cookies to serve advertisements based on a visitor’s prior visits to this and other sites. You can decline personalized advertising at Google Ads Settings, opt out of third-party vendors’ cookies at aboutads.info, and read how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. An ad blocker stops all of it, and the site works exactly the same without advertising.
Two commitments constrain where an advertisement can go, and both are enforced in the code rather than left to prose. No advertisement appears on a page that is not published, or on a ZIP profile — 63,927 of the 70,333 pages are in that state; they still load for anyone who lands on them, but they carry no ads. And no advertisement is placed above the answer a visitor came for, inside search, inside the scoring controls, or styled to resemble profile content: every unit carries a label, and the two positions are mounted past the jobs, schools and housing sections, which is structurally past the answer rather than merely intended to be. The editorial policy sets out the reasoning.
Data about places, not people
Everything AreaProfile publishes describes geographic areas and comes from published federal statistics. It contains no information about individuals, and the statistical agencies whose data it uses apply their own disclosure protections before publishing.