Privacy
No accounts and no names. Here is what happens to a report, who can see each part of it, and what stays on your phone.
On the public map
Anyone can see:
- What happened and the details you picked
- When it happened
- The street, cross street and neighborhood
- Roughly where. Each point is moved up to about 35 meters, so a report from your doorstep doesn't show your house.
- Whether it has a 311 ticket, and the ticket's status
Not on the map
Your own words and the exact spot are never shown on the map or on a report's share page. They're kept with the report so it can be sent to the right place.
Who sees your own words
- 311 or PennDOT, when you send a report. You send it yourself. If you email it, it comes from your email address, like any email you write.
- The city, in summaries. We may share reports with city offices, such as the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure or council members, to help fix dangerous streets. Those can include your words and the exact spot. They never include your name, because we don't have it.
- Whoever runs Walk Safe PGH, who can see everything in the database.
Leave out anything about yourself that you wouldn't want the city to read.
Your location
The app asks for your location only to put the pin where you are, and only while you're making a report. It doesn't track you. The only location saved is the spot of each report. To find the street name, our server looks the spot up in OpenStreetMap.
On your phone
The keys that let you change or delete your reports are saved in this browser. That's how My reports knows which reports are yours. You can delete any of your reports there at any time, and it's gone from the map and the database. If you clear your browser data, the keys go with it, unless you saved your private link.
Spam protection and site stats
- To stop one connection from flooding the map, each report briefly keeps a scrambled form of your internet address. It's cleared out after an hour or so.
- We count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies. If something breaks, we get an error report with the page it happened on, without your internet address or private links.
- Like any website, the services that host the app keep short-lived server logs.