Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 14, 2026

This policy covers the website worldnaturaldisasters.com and the World Natural Disasters Android app (com.worldnaturaldisasters.wnd_app). Both are operated by Shahzeb Speaks LLC, 1500 N Grant St, Denver, CO 80203-1859, United States.

Summary: we collect the minimum data needed to run the site: an email address if you subscribe to alerts, technical logs for security, and — only if you agree — anonymous usage statistics through Google Analytics. We never sell personal data. The Android app requires no account and stores your watched places on your phone only.

What we collect

  • Alert subscriptions: your email address and chosen preferences (countries, disaster types, severity, frequency). Stored only after double opt-in confirmation.
  • Push notifications: a browser-generated push endpoint (no email or name required).
  • Contact form: the name, email and message you submit, plus IP address for spam prevention.
  • Server logs: standard technical logs (IP, user-agent, requested URL) retained briefly for security and debugging.
  • Reports sent from the app, if you send one: the observations you chose from a fixed list, optionally one photograph, optionally a position rounded to about 110 metres, and an anonymous device identifier. No name, no contact details, and no free text — a report has no field to type into. Full detail in the App Privacy Policy.

What we do NOT do

  • We do not sell, rent or share personal data with third parties for marketing.
  • We do not require an account to use the site.
  • We do not put tracking pixels in alert emails.

Legal basis & your rights

Alert emails are sent on the basis of your explicit consent, which you may withdraw at any time via the unsubscribe link in every email or the manage page. You have the right to access, correct or delete your data — the manage page includes a one-click full deletion, or contact us.

Cookies

We use technically necessary cookies (session and security), and — only after you choose "Accept all" on the banner — Google Analytics cookies. Every cookie is named individually in the cookie policy.

Third-party services

Map tiles are loaded from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org, OpenStreetMap data), or from CARTO when your browser cannot draw OpenFreeMap's maps, and country flags from flagcdn.com; these providers see your IP address as part of serving them. Disaster data is fetched server-side — the agencies do not see your visits.

Some event pages show before-and-after satellite images. Those pictures load in your browser directly from Amazon Web Services' public Sentinel-2 archive, so AWS sees your IP address as part of serving them; the page tells your browser not to send AWS the address of the page you were reading.

When a search looks like the name of a place, our server asks OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service where that place is. Only the words you typed are sent, never your IP address, and the answer is kept so the same place is not looked up twice. Background text on historical disaster pages is fetched from Wikipedia the same way — by our server, not your browser.

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages people find useful, so we can improve them. This is measurement of pages, not profiling of people: it does not record your name, your email address or your exact location, and Google Analytics 4 does not store IP addresses at all — they are discarded at collection and there is no setting to change that.

Legal basis: your consent. Analytics cookies are set only after you choose "Accept all". In the EU, the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, nothing is stored unless you actively agree — ignoring the banner counts as refusal. You can withdraw consent at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser, which also makes the banner ask again.

Google acts as our processor and may transfer data outside your country under its standard contractual clauses. Their description is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and a browser-wide opt-out is at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

The Android app contains no analytics of any kind. This section is about the website only.

The Android app

The app has its own full policy at App Privacy Policy. In summary:

The World Natural Disasters Android app has no account and no sign-in, and we never learn your name, your email or your phone number. Two things you can choose to do send data to us, and nothing else does: creating or joining a Family Circle, and sending a report about an event. Both are described in full in the App Privacy Policy; the rules for what may be reported are in the Content Policy. Everything else — your watchlist, your alert history, your settings — stays on the phone.

  • Your watched places stay on your phone. The places you add, their labels and notes, your alert history and your settings are stored in the app's own storage on the device. They are never sent to our servers. Uninstalling the app deletes them.
  • Disaster data is read from our public API at worldnaturaldisasters.com. Like any web request, our server sees your IP address and records it in the standard technical logs described above. The request does not identify you or say which places you watch.
  • Weather and air quality are requested from Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com) using only the coordinates of the place being shown. No account, name or device identifier is attached. Open-Meteo sees your IP address as part of answering the request.
  • Map tiles are loaded from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org), or from CARTO (basemaps.cartocdn.com) if OpenFreeMap’s map cannot be loaded; either sees your IP address as part of serving them.
  • Place search runs on the phone from a built-in list of countries and towns. Only if you tap “Search online” is the name you typed sent to us, and we look it up with OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service; that request appears in the standard technical logs described above.
  • Every decision to show you an alert is made on your phone. The app checks for matching events itself and raises a local notification; your watchlist is not sent anywhere for this. Because a background check can run late, the app also receives push messages through Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, subscribed to map squares rather than to you: we publish an event to an area and are never told which devices are listening, so we hold no device list and cannot send anything to one particular phone.
  • Emergency agency contacts are bundled in the app and work with no network. The agency websites are only contacted if you choose to tap a link, which opens in your browser.

Adverts in the app. The app shows banner adverts from Google AdMob, which reads your device’s resettable advertising identifier to limit repeat adverts and measure them. Adverts never appear on any screen carrying an alert, a safety guide, an emergency contact list or a live event, and there are no full-screen or pop-up adverts. Full detail, including how to reset that identifier, is in the app privacy policy.

What the app still does not contain: no analytics SDK and no third-party library other than Google's advertising and messaging SDKs described above. We receive no usage statistics from the app at all. The app does not request location permission — places are ones you add yourself, and they never leave your phone. Note that the advertising SDK does report diagnostic and crash information about itself to Google; that is listed in full in the app privacy policy.

We will update this section before any release that changes the above.

Data retention

Subscriptions: until you unsubscribe or delete them. Contact messages: up to 24 months. Server logs: up to 30 days.

App data: held on your device until you delete it in the app or uninstall the app. Alert history is automatically discarded after 30 days.

Children

Neither the site nor the app is directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Contact

Privacy questions: via the contact form, or by email to admin@shahzebspeaks.com (Shahzeb Speaks LLC, 1500 N Grant St, Denver, CO 80203-1859, United States).