Privacy policy

The short version

CellTowerLookup.com has no accounts, no logins, no sign-up or contact forms and no mailing list, and it sets no cookies of its own. We don't keep a history of who searched for what. The site does use Google Analytics, loads a few files from outside services, and needs to turn the address you type into a map location. This page explains exactly what that means.

What a search sends

As you type in the search box (from the third character on), your browser sends what you have typed to our server to fetch address suggestions. Our server passes it to our own geocoding service, which runs on our servers and looks addresses up in OpenStreetMap data we host ourselves and, for some street addresses, in the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder. That Census request comes from our server, so the Census Bureau sees the address but not your IP address. To list nearby places first, our server uses the approximate location (roughly city level) that Cloudflare works out from your IP address, rounded to about a kilometer. It is used for that one request and not stored.

When you search, what you typed goes into the page's web address (after /lookup?q=). ZIP codes, cities, counties, carriers and tower IDs are matched against our own tower catalog first, with no outside service involved. A street address, or a suggestion you picked from the list, is turned into coordinates by our geocoding service (again using your approximate area to break ties), or by the Census geocoder if ours can't place it, and you are sent to a results page whose web address contains those coordinates and the matched address.

Because web addresses travel with every page request, your search is visible to:

• our server, which reads it to build the results page,
• Cloudflare, which carries all traffic to this site,
• Google Analytics, which records the address of each page viewed,
• Mediavine and its advertising partners, which receive the address of the page an ad appears on,
• and your own browser history, plus anyone you share the link with.

Our geocoding service keeps recent lookups in memory for up to a week so repeat searches are fast; that cache is not tied to who searched and is lost when the service restarts. If one of its lookup services fails, it may write a sample error line, which can include the search text, to our server's error log.

You don't need to enter your own home address. A ZIP code, a town or a nearby street works just as well.

“Use my location”

This button asks your browser for your location, and your browser asks your permission first. If you allow it, your latitude and longitude, rounded to about 10 meters, are put into the results page's web address, so they reach the same places listed above. We also record in Google Analytics that the button was used, without the coordinates in that event. If you'd rather not share precise coordinates, type a ZIP code or town instead.

Maps

Maps are drawn with the open-source MapLibre library, which your browser loads from unpkg.com. The map style and map data, OpenStreetMap data in the Protomaps format, come from our own tile server (maptiles.pwhite.org); the fonts and icons used for map labels come from protomaps.github.io. Loading a map means your browser requests the map data for the area on screen, so those servers see your IP address and which area you are viewing. The tower points on the map come from our own server.

Fonts and share images

The page fonts (Archivo and IBM Plex Mono) are loaded from Google Fonts, so Google sees your IP address when a page loads.

The preview images that appear when a page is shared are drawn by our own server from the public tower data. They contain nothing about you, and they are fetched by whichever app or site shows the link preview.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages get visited and how people move through the site. It uses cookies and reports to us in aggregate; we don't see individual visitors' identities. You can opt out with the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Advertising

This site shows advertising served through Mediavine (its Journey program). Mediavine and its advertising partners use cookies, device identifiers and similar technologies to select and measure ads, including ads based on your activity on other sites. What they typically receive includes your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you viewed and the time of your visit.

You can limit or opt out of personalised advertising here:

• Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out (US)
• Your Online Choices (EU/UK)
• Network Advertising Initiative opt-out
• Google Ads Settings

Mediavine's own disclosures are at mediavine.com/privacy-policy. Where consent is required, a consent prompt is presented before personalised ads are served, and you can change your choice at any time through that prompt.

Other companies whose servers your browser contacts

• Cloudflare: carries all traffic to this site.
• Google: analytics and the page fonts.
• unpkg.com: serves the MapLibre map library on pages with a map.
• protomaps.github.io (GitHub): serves the map label fonts and icons.
• Mediavine (scripts.scriptwrapper.com) and its advertising partners: ads, as above.

Each of these sees your IP address because your browser requested a file from it.

Logs

Our own web server does not keep a log of the pages you request. Cloudflare, which carries traffic to the site, records standard request information such as IP address, browser type, the page address (including any search in it) and time, for security and performance, under its own privacy policy. We do not sell or share any of this, and we don't use it to build profiles of visitors.

What we don't do

We don't have accounts. We set no cookies of our own. We have no contact forms, mailing list or newsletter, and we don't collect email addresses through the site. We don't keep a history of searches tied to anyone. We don't sell personal information.

The tower data

The tower records come from the FCC's Antenna Structure Registration, a public dataset about structures, and from OpenCelliD's crowdsourced cell reports, which are about cells, not the people whose phones reported them. Owner names are as registered with the FCC.

Your rights

If you are a California resident, the CCPA/CPRA gives you the right to know what personal information is collected about you and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We don't sell personal information ourselves; to opt out of personalised advertising, use the links above.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another place with comparable law, you have rights of access, correction, deletion and restriction under the GDPR or its local equivalent. Because we hold no accounts and keep no search history, we usually have nothing on file to return or delete, but for any request or question, write to p@pwhite.org.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the date at the top of this page will change.

Contact

Privacy questions: p@pwhite.org