Privacy
Your land folder is yours. The public record stays public. Here is exactly what that means.
What we keep
- Your email address, if you make an account.
- A fingerprint of a key made from your password. Your browser turns your password into a key before sending it, and we keep only a salted fingerprint of that key. The password itself never reaches us.
- Your places: the pins and outlines you draw, the names you give them, your questions, and everything you add to your folder, including files. Deleting your account deletes all of them.
- Questions put to the Reference Desk, saved with their answers. See below for who reads them.
- Feedback and error reports you send us, with an email address only if you give one.
- Small cookies that make the site work. One remembers a place you haven’t saved to an account yet, one remembers your reading level, and one keeps you signed in. None of them follow you to other sites.
What is public
- Surveyor’s Walk cards. A card describes a survey section from the public record. It never shows your pin or outline.
- Anything you choose to publish from your folder. You pick what shows, and you can unpublish it any time.
- Anything you give to America’s School Trust Library, once a librarian accepts it. You can ask us to take it down.
Everything else in your folder is private by default.
Who else sees what
- Questions you put to the Reference Desk are saved. Each question, and the parts of the record it needs, is sent to an AI service run by Cloudflare to write the answer. The site’s owner and the reference librarian may read saved questions and answers to grade the desk. Please don’t type anything there you wouldn’t want them, or an AI service, to read.
- To find your survey section, our server sends the spot’s map coordinates (never your name) to the Bureau of Land Management’s public survey map. If you search by address, our server asks the U.S. Census Bureau’s address finder where it is.
- To find your section and build your brief, our server also sends the spot’s map coordinates (never your name) to the Census Bureau, to name the state and county; to the U.S. Geological Survey, for old topographic maps and official place names; and to the U.S. Forest Service’s map of federal land-cession records.
- The site runs on Cloudflare, which stores the database and your files for us.
- Map pictures come from the U.S. Geological Survey. When you look at a map, your browser asks USGS for those map squares.
No ads. No trackers or analytics. We don’t sell anything about you. We don’t sell or share your private folder. We would hand it over only if the law required it.
This site doesn’t send email to members or visitors.
Taking it with you, or taking it away
On your account page you can download everything you’ve given us as one file, or delete your account and everything in it. Deleting is permanent.
Questions
Ask us through the Feedback page. A person reads every message.