Privacy Policy

Keepwatch is an independent site about local government, development, real estate and places to go. You can read everything without an account. We do not sell data, show ads, or build profiles of visitors.

We keep your email address, the name you choose to show, how you sign in (an email link or Google), when you joined, your plan (Free, Basic, Pro or Elite, and when a plan started or ends) and a display preference. If your plan lets you, we also keep what you choose to follow: places you save, towns, development projects and council topics you follow, whether you want updates about each, and how often you would like to hear from us. If you accept the terms for owner information, we keep which version you accepted and when.

All of it is stored with Supabase, the database service we use, and used only to run your account. Nobody else can read your rows, and we do not share them. You can delete your account on the Account page; that deletes all of it.

We keep a log of plan changes (who changed an account's plan, and when) and, when owner information is offered, of what was looked up with it. These logs are kept to prevent misuse.

Signing in sets a cookie that keeps you signed in. Visitors who do not sign in get no such cookie.

Today we email you only a sign-in link when you ask for one. We plan to send account holders a weekly update about their town; when that starts, every email will have a one-click way to stop it.

Our emails are sent through Resend, an email delivery service, which receives your email address and the message so it can deliver it.

A few display preferences (for example whether a long list is expanded, and the last town you looked at) are saved in your own browser, not sent to us. So is a small visit counter: the first and last day this browser opened the site, and on how many days. The counter itself never leaves your browser (see below for the rough band that does).

The site is hosted by Vercel. Like any web server, it receives your IP address and basic request details. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views; it does not use cookies and does not identify you. We also count two things ourselves, in our own database (Supabase), so we can tell whether the site is useful: once per visit, which town's pages you opened and whether this browser has been here before, in rough bands only (for example “returning, 1–6 days since the last visit, on 2–4 days so far”); and when you tap an item in a list of changes, which town, which kind of item it was and where on the site you tapped it (the item is a public record, such as a meeting or a project). We store no account, no IP address and no cookie with either, so neither is linked to you or to any other visit; like any server, the database service's own request logs briefly see your IP address. If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control”, we send neither. Weather, air quality and rip current forecasts are fetched by our own server from Open-Meteo and the National Weather Service, so those services never see you.

Maps are drawn in your browser with tiles from OpenFreeMap, which receives your IP address when your browser asks for them. “Near me” asks your browser for your location only when you tap it; the location stays in your browser and is never sent to us. Some pages show ratings, photos, hours and reviews from Google Maps in a separate panel labelled “via Google”. That content loads straight from Google into your browser; we do not receive or keep it. When it loads, Google's own privacy policy applies: Google Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy incorporates it for that content.

The “Watch this area” button opens a Google Form. Anything you enter there goes to Google Forms under Google's privacy policy and is used only to hear who wants alerts.

The site is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly keep accounts for them.

If what we collect changes, this page changes first, with a new date at the top.