Privacy
Reading PlainCities needs no account and no email address. What PlainCities learns about visitors comes only from the tools below; Kiznis Studio, which owns PlainCities, is the controller of that data.
Published · last revised
What runs on the site
| Tool | Job | Stores |
|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | Loads Google's ad code; ads appear once Google approves the site. In Europe it also shows Google's consent banner. | Advertising cookies, only where you allow them |
| Google Analytics 4 | Counts visits and the pages read | The _ga cookies once measurement is allowed; event data kept up to 14 months |
| Umami | Counts page views as totals, on a server Kiznis Studio runs (analytics.opspixel.com) | Nothing on your device; it counts visits with a salted hash of your IP address and browser; the salt changes each month and the IP address itself is not stored |
| Cloudflare | Delivers the pages and blocks abusive traffic | Possibly a 30-minute security cookie (__cf_bm) that tells people from bots |
| Sentry | Records errors (the page address without any query, the time, the browser) so faults can be fixed | Nothing on your device |
| Census Bureau geocoder | Turns an address you type into the tract lookup into a census tract; the address goes to the Census Bureau and is not stored by PlainCities | Nothing on your device |
| Your browser | Remembers whether you chose light or dark mode | One localStorage entry on your device |
Consent, by region
What happens depends on where you read PlainCities from. A reader in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland sees Google's consent banner before anything else: no measurement or advertising cookie is set, and Google Analytics is not loaded, until a choice is made. A reader in the United States gets ads and measurement switched on and can switch them off as described below. Everywhere else, visits are measured and advertising cookies wait for consent. Without advertising storage, Google strips identifying ad data and carries the identifier of an ad click in the link rather than in a cookie.
Advertising and analytics cookies rest on consent; take it back at any time by clearing plaincities.com's cookies, or, in Europe, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, from the consent banner's settings. Umami's totals cannot single anyone out, and counting how many people read a county or tract page is a legitimate interest of the site. Google and Cloudflare can handle data in the United States under their own transfer terms.
Searches and lookups stay private
Words typed into the site search are part of the page address, so the web server's access log keeps them for up to seven days (see below); analytics records that the search page was opened, without the words. An address typed into the tract lookup is sent in the body of the request, not in the page address, so it reaches no log, analytics, ad request or cache: PlainCities passes it to the Census Bureau's geocoder and keeps nothing. A site you go on to only learns that you arrived from plaincities.com. Google's consent banner stores your choice in its own cookies (FCCDCF and FCNEC).
Opting out in the United States
Google picks ads from a cookie identifier, your IP address and the location it implies, and the census pages you have read; several state privacy laws count passing that to advertisers as selling or sharing personal information. To opt out, send a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser (PlainCities honors it), change Google's ad settings at adssettings.google.com, or use optout.aboutads.info. PlainCities cannot recognize your browser from an email, so these are the ways an opt-out takes effect.
Your rights
The GDPR and laws like it let you ask what PlainCities holds about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to its use and complain to your data protection authority; an answer comes within one month. PlainCities' own systems hold three kinds of personal data: an email you send us, kept until the matter is closed; the application's request log, which holds only its latest 30 MB and overwrites itself as it fills; and the web server's access log, on PlainCities' server in the United States, which records each request's IP address, browser and page address (with any search words in it) and deletes them after seven days. The census figures on the site describe places and tracts, never a person.
Children
PlainCities is a reference site for adults and does not knowingly collect information from children under 13; it asks for no personal information beyond an address typed into the tract lookup, which goes to the Census Bureau's geocoder and is not kept.
Who is responsible
The controller is Kiznis Studio, Lithuania, the owner of PlainCities. Write to hello@plaincities.com.