Privacy policy

The short version

There is no account to make and no password to keep. The site sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and carries no advertising or tracking scripts. Nothing you type is sold, rented or handed to a data broker.

What a lookup does is send the address you typed to a set of government mapping services, one after another, and put their answers on one page. Those agencies see the address, because that is the question being asked of them.

What the site collects

• The address you type. From the third character onward, what is in the field is sent to this site’s server so it can ask Google for address suggestions. When you run the lookup, the finished address is sent to the server and on to the services listed below.
• Ordinary server logs. The hosting platform records the usual request details: time, path, response status, browser user agent and IP address.
• Your IP address, for rate limiting. A lookup makes many outbound requests to services that are free to us as a courtesy, so each visitor is limited to a small number per minute. Nobody signs in anywhere here, so an IP address is the only handle there is on “the same visitor”.

The rate limiter is shared across servers through a hosted database. Before an address reaches that database it is hashed with a secret key held on the server, so what is stored is a counter against an unreadable string rather than a list of IP addresses.

Cookies, storage and tracking

This site sets no cookies. There is no analytics package, no advertising pixel and no third-party tracker in the page.

One small thing is written to your browser: a single flag in session storage, so the opening animation plays once rather than on every page you visit. It is not an identifier, it is not sent anywhere, and your browser discards it when you close the tab.

The map is drawn by Google’s Maps JavaScript API, which runs inside your browser. Google therefore receives your IP address and the usual details of that request, and may write storage of its own, under Google’s privacy policy. That is outside this site’s control. When Google is not available the map falls back to OpenFreeMap for its base tiles, which likewise sees the request your browser makes to it.

Where an address goes when a lookup runs

A lookup is a set of questions put to public agencies. Each one receives either the address or the point it resolves to, and nothing else about you. Most of these calls are made by this site’s server, so the agency sees the server rather than you; the exception is the map, where the overlays you switch on are fetched by your browser directly from the agency publishing them.

• Google Maps Platform. Address suggestions while you type, turning the finished address into a point, and the basemap and satellite imagery.
• US Census Bureau. A second geocoder used when Google has no match, and the source of the county, census tract and school district. Census tables also supply the area’s published statistics, by way of the FCC’s block lookup.
• FEMA. The flood zone from the National Flood Hazard Layer, the National Risk Index, and flood claim counts published by county.
• Michigan EGLE. Critical dune areas, high-risk erosion areas, wetlands, the coastal zone, water well records and the contamination inventory.
• Michigan DTMB and the county assessors. The parcel and assessment record for the 21 Michigan counties this reads directly, and the zoning and future land use layers where a municipality publishes them.
• USDA, USGS and NOAA. Soils, elevation and hydrography, and the nearest Great Lakes water level gauge.
• MDOT. Traffic counts on the nearest measured road segment.
• EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Regulated facilities nearby, and the National Inventory of Dams.
• The National Park Service, the Michigan Historical Center and the Library of Congress. National Register listings, historical markers, Sanborn fire insurance maps and historic newspapers.
• The National Center for Education Statistics and Michigan’s school data. The district and the schools in it.
• The FAA. Nearby airports and airspace.

Each of these services has its own privacy practices. Sending them an address is the only way to get an answer about that address, which is what the site exists to do.

The written paragraph under the report

After the report is complete, the page asks for a short written read of what the findings mean together. That is produced by a language model running on Rennie’s own hardware rather than by a commercial AI service, reached through a queue in a hosted database because the machine is not on the public internet.

What is put on that queue is the town and county and the findings already printed on the page. The street address is deliberately not sent. The queued job and its answer are erased on a short retention schedule, within about half an hour of the answer finishing, and the rows themselves are removed within a day.

Caching and how long things are kept

Agency answers are held briefly in the server’s memory so that asking about the same property twice does not put the same question to the same agency twice. Location results are held for about a week. This cache lives in memory only and is gone whenever the server restarts or is replaced.

There is no database of visitors’ searches. Nobody keeps a list of the addresses that have been looked up here. Server logs are retained by the hosting platform under its own schedule, and the rate-limit counters described above expire within minutes.

Contacting Rennie is a separate thing

If you call, text or email using the details on this site, that is an ordinary business conversation between you and him. It lands in his phone and his mailbox, not in this site’s servers, and it is used to answer you. It is not added to a mailing list and it is not passed to anyone else.

No sale of personal information

Nothing collected here is sold, rented, traded or shared for advertising. There is no advertising network on this site and no arrangement with any data broker.

Children

This is a tool for people researching property. It is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has sent personal information through this site, write to the address below and it will be removed.

Changes to this policy

When this changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. If a change is significant, it will be described here rather than folded in quietly.

Who to ask

Rennie Barton, REALTOR® / Owner, City2Shore Arete Collection
1505 Quincy St SW, Grandville, MI 49418
(616) 856-1492
renniebarton@city2shore.com

What the site is and the rules for using it are covered separately, in the terms of use.