What this site collects

Every page loads Google Analytics and Vercel Web Analytics. That is the complete list of tracking scripts on this site. There is no advertising, no retargeting pixel, no session recorder, no A/B testing tool, and no third-party script beyond those two. The map is the one page that reaches further: it draws its background from one outside service and answers searches from another, and each sees your IP address the way any web request does. Both are named in full under What the map loads below.

There is nothing to sign up for. No accounts, no logins, no newsletter, no comment box, no contact form — the only text field anywhere on the site is the search box on the map, and what happens to it is described below. We do not sell, rent, or trade anything about visitors, and there is no visitor database to sell.

Google Analytics 4 loads on every page from googletagmanager.com. Its configuration is a short inline snippet you can read in this page’s source — four statements that initialize the tag and send the page view, and nothing else. We define no custom events, set no user identifiers, attach no advertising features, and pass it no content of our own. It collects what Google collects by default for any site — the page URL and referrer, an approximate location derived from your IP address, and your device and browser — under Google’s own terms, not ours.

Vercel Web Analytics runs alongside it and reports aggregate page views and traffic sources for the site. Vercel documents it as cookieless and non-identifying; the only thing our code does is include it.

We look at both for one reason: to see which explainers and which city pages people actually use, so the reporting and the data go where they are read. Nothing on this site changes based on who you are, because we do not know.

The site is served by Vercel, which — like any host — processes the requests needed to deliver a page, including your IP address and browser. That is true whether or not analytics loads.

Our own code never sets or reads a cookie, and it stores nothing in your browser’s local storage. Google Analytics does set cookies of its own — the _ga pair — which is how it tells a returning visitor from a new one. Block the script and those cookies never appear.

The map runs in your browser and pulls from a few outside services. Each one necessarily sees your IP address, the way any web request does, and each keeps its own logs under its own policy:

OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org) serves the background map — the roads, water, and labels underneath the camera dots.

The camera layer is a single pre-built tile file served from this site or its storage host. It contains camera locations only; nothing about you is sent to fetch it.

Photon (photon.komoot.io) turns what you type in the map’s search box into coordinates. When you type at least two characters and pause, that text is sent there and nowhere else. We do not log searches, store them, or send them to analytics.

OpenStreetMap is contacted only if you click through from a camera’s panel to view or edit its underlying record.

One consequence worth stating plainly: as you pan the map, the coordinates and zoom level are written into the page URL so the view can be linked and reloaded. While Google Analytics is loaded, the page URL is part of what it records — so the area you were looking at can be visible to it. Blocking the analytics script, or clearing the lat, lng, and zoom parameters, ends that.

The locations on this site come from OpenStreetMap contributors, who document license plate readers they observe on public roads. It is a record of fixed public infrastructure — a pole, a camera, sometimes the manufacturer and the direction it faces. It contains no plate reads, no vehicle records, and no personal information about anyone, visitors of this site included. How it is gathered and how to correct it is documented on the methodology page, and the whole dataset is downloadable.

Any content blocker or browser tracking protection that blocks googletagmanager.com stops Google Analytics here, and Google publishes an official opt-out browser add-on that does the same across every site. Blocking works on this site without breaking it: analytics is not load-bearing, and every page, the map included, works with both analytics tools blocked.

The map’s own third parties are a different matter, and worth knowing before you block them wholesale. The background map is drawn from OpenFreeMap, so blocking tiles.openfreemap.org leaves the map page without a map. Photon only answers the search box: block photon.komoot.io and search stops returning results, while the rest of the map behaves normally.

To be honest about the limits: nothing in this site’s code reads the Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control header, so we cannot claim to honor a signal we never check. Blocking the script is the route that actually works.

If a camera on the map is wrong, moved, or gone, the fix belongs in the underlying OpenStreetMap record — the methodology page explains how, and the change reaches this site with the next refresh. For anything about this page, or about the site generally, write to contact@findingflock.com, the same address listed on the about page. If this page and the site’s behavior ever disagree, tell us and we will correct the page.