QuickWhere

Privacy

QuickWhere is a privacy-first geography and location reference site: we do not require user accounts, do not set advertising cookies, and do not store your GPS coordinates, street addresses, or search history in any database.

When You Use Your Browser Location (GPS)

Your browser always asks for your explicit permission before reading your device’s location. Many tools on QuickWhere—such as coordinate conversion, time zone offset calculation, sunrise and sunset times, great-circle distance, polygon area, antipode calculation, and country lookup—process your coordinates entirely inside your browser using static files hosted on this site.

When a tool needs official U.S. Census Bureau municipal, county, state, or district attributes, your coordinates are sent over HTTPS to our stateless /api/lookup endpoint, which forwards them to the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder with Cache-Control: no-store and discards the coordinates immediately after returning the response. Your browser also queries the U.S. Census Bureau’s public TIGERweb service directly to draw county or ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) boundary lines on the map.

When You Enter a Street Address, City, or ZIP Code

Full U.S. street addresses are submitted in the body of an HTTPS POST request—never in the page URL or query string—so street addresses do not appear in browser history URLs, referrer headers, analytics page-view events, or standard web server access logs. Our /api/lookup function forwards the address to the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder, returns the matched coordinates and administrative boundaries, and stores nothing.

Five-digit ZIP Code lookups, city autocomplete, and radius searches read static JSON shards hosted directly on QuickWhere (/data/zip/, /data/zip-centroid/, and /data/places/) without sending your query to any external third party.

Elevation, Map Tiles, and Website Analytics

On the elevation tool (/what-is-my-elevation/), your browser sends the queried latitude and longitude directly to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) Elevation Point Query Service. Interactive vector maps load base map tiles from OpenFreeMap (built on OpenStreetMap data). To understand aggregate page traffic and site performance, QuickWhere uses Google Analytics 4 (and optionally Cloudflare Web Analytics); your GPS coordinates and street addresses are never sent to analytics services.

Summary of External Public Services