Privacy policy

HazardSim has no accounts, no sign-up and no ads. This page lists everything that is collected anyway, who receives it and how to limit it.

Updated 26 September 2026

The short version

• We don't ask for your name, email or any other personal details, and we don't sell data.
• When you run a simulation, an anonymous record of it — hazard, size, place name, coordinates rounded to about 11 km, estimated toll, time — appears on the public Recent launches page for 30 days.
• We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which features are used.
• To draw maps and find places, your browser loads data directly from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap services.

Who is responsible

The website hazardsim.com and the HazardSim Android app ("HazardSim", "we"). Contact for any privacy question or request: [email protected].

The Android app

This policy covers the HazardSim app for Android (package com.hazardsim.app) as well as the website. The app is a shell around this same website: it opens hazardsim.com in the Android system browser engine, so everything described on this page applies to it unchanged.

What that means in practice:

• The app asks for no Android permissions at all — no location, no storage, no camera, no contacts. You can check this on its Google Play listing.
• It does not read your device's GPS. Where a map opens is worked out on our server from the country and city your IP address resolves to, exactly as on the website.
• It collects no advertising identifier and contains no advertising.
• It stores nothing on your device beyond what the browser engine keeps for the website itself — the two settings listed below and the browser's own cache. Uninstalling the app removes them.
• Google Play collects its own data about installs and crashes under the Google Privacy Policy; we see only aggregate statistics in the Play Console and cannot identify anyone from them.

The shared launch feed

Each time you run a simulation, your browser sends one record to our server so it can be shown on the Recent launches page. The record contains only:

• the hazard type and its size (for example, "meteor, 150 m"), and the material or building-quality option if you chose one;
• the place name shown by the simulator (a city or area name from the map);
• the coordinates of the point, rounded to one decimal degree — roughly 11 km, enough for a dot on a world map and not enough to point at a street;
• the estimated number of casualties from the simulation;
• the time the record was received.

The record contains no IP address, no device identifier and nothing that links it to you. Records are shown for 30 days and then deleted from our storage automatically, at the latest 31 days after they were received.

To stop automated spam, the server counts how many records arrive from each network address. It stores only a one-way salted hash of the address with a counter, never the address itself, and discards it after 10 minutes.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 (Google Ireland Ltd / Google LLC) to understand how many people visit, from which countries, on which devices, and which pages and features they use. Google Analytics sets first-party cookies (named _ga and _ga_*) and processes your IP address to determine an approximate location; Google Analytics 4 does not log or store full IP addresses. We also send an analytics event when a simulation is run, containing the same hazard type, size, place name and estimated toll as the shared feed.

You can block these cookies in your browser settings, use a content blocker, or install Google's Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The site works the same without them. Google's own practices are described in the Google Privacy Policy.

What is stored in your browser

The simulator uses your browser's local storage (not cookies) for two things, and neither leaves your device:

• hazardsim.lang — the interface language you chose;
• hazardsim.log — a list of your own last 60 simulations, kept only in this browser.

Clearing your site data for hazardsim.com removes both.

Services your browser contacts directly

A map simulator cannot work without map data. When you use HazardSim, your browser requests data from these providers, which receive your IP address, your browser's standard request headers and the map area or search text involved:

• Mapbox — map and satellite tiles, terrain elevation, place search. Mapbox privacy policy.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim — finding the city at the point you clicked and its boundary. OSMF privacy policy.
• Overpass API (overpass-api.de) — population figures from OpenStreetMap for the area you picked.
• OpenFreeMap — the world map on the Recent launches page.
• Google Fonts — the typefaces of the site. Google Privacy Policy.
• Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics — see above.

Hosting and server logs

The site is delivered through Cloudflare, which protects it from attacks and speeds up delivery, and runs on a web server that keeps standard access logs (IP address, time, requested address, browser user agent). These logs are used only for security and troubleshooting and are kept for a limited time. Cloudflare privacy policy.

Legal bases

Where the EU or UK GDPR applies, we rely on our legitimate interest in running, securing and improving a free public website (server logs, spam protection, the anonymous feed, map services needed for the feature you use) and on your consent where the law requires it for analytics cookies.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal data, to object to processing and to complain to a data protection authority. Because we don't collect names or accounts and the feed is anonymous, we usually cannot link any record to a specific person — but write to [email protected] and we will help as far as we can. For data held by Google, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap or Cloudflare, their own policies apply.

Children

HazardSim is an educational tool suitable for school use and does not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes

If what we collect changes, this page will change first, and the date at the top will be updated.