Privacy

Last updated 2026-07-19

OutageTracker is a free, community-run tool for tracking power outages around New Providence, NJ. There is no account system — anyone can submit or view a report without signing up for anything. This page describes, plainly, what happens to the information behind a report.

What's attached to a report

Nothing that identifies you as a person. There is no name, no account, no login — a report is just a location, a few optional details, and a timestamp.

The location you report

The pin you drop (or the address you enter, if you use that option instead) is stored as you reported it — it is not randomly shifted. An earlier version of this app did randomly offset locations for privacy, but that was removed after a real case where it displaced a report onto a different street on a different power circuit, and separately risked making it look like a specific, uninvolved neighbor had filed the report. Since no name or account is ever attached to a report, that offset wasn't protecting an identity — it was just making the map less accurate.

Separately, no individual report is ever plotted on the public map as its own marker — showing a live pin at one specific address (even an accurate one) could let someone infer which specific house currently has no power, which is a real physical-security concern independent of identity. Instead, the map groups every outage within roughly the same area (about a kilometer) into one marker showing counts — so what you see publicly is always an area total, never a single address.

Optional information

• Nearby intersection / notes — free text you can optionally add, shown publicly as entered (cleaned up to strip anything unsafe to render).
• Contact email— entirely optional, used only if we need to follow up on your specific report. It's encrypted before it's stored and is never shown publicly or to other visitors.
• Address lookup— if you type an address instead of clicking the map, it's sent once to a geocoding service to convert it to a location, and the address text itself is discarded immediately after. Only a one-way hash of the standardized address is kept, so we can tell "this is probably the same household reporting twice" without storing the address itself.

What we use to prevent abuse

Your IP address is hashed (not stored as plain text) and used only to rate-limit and flag unusual submission patterns — never to identify you, and never shown to anyone. Your browser also gets a random identifier stored in its local storage (not a fingerprint — clearing your browser data resets it), used the same way as an additional abuse signal. A CAPTCHA (Cloudflare Turnstile) runs when you submit a report, which involves your browser loading a script from Cloudflare and completing a challenge.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics to understand aggregate traffic and usage patterns (e.g. how many people visit, which pages). It does not receive any report content, location, or contact information you submit.

What we don't do

• We don't sell or share your data with third parties.
• We don't show ads.
• We don't require or ask for your name.

Known limitations

This is a community-built, volunteer-maintained project, not a company with a dedicated privacy team. In particular: there is currently no automated process to delete old data after a fixed window, and no self-service way to request removal of a specific report. If either of those matters to you, keep that in mind before including anything identifying in the optional notes field.