Privacy

What personal information we collect

One thing, and only if you send it. HomeStats has a contact form at /contact/. If you use it, we receive what you enter: your name, your email address, the topic you pick and your message. Netlify Forms, which handles the form, also records the IP address, browser details and page address it was sent from, checks it for spam with Akismet, stores the submission in our account at Netlify and emails it to us. We use it to reply to you and for nothing else, we do not add you to any mailing list, and we will delete it if you ask.

Otherwise, nothing identifying. Browsing HomeStats sends us nothing about you beyond the IP address and browser details every web request carries, which are covered under Server logs below. It is a static site served by Netlify. Your browser fetches HTML and JSON. No analytics scripts, no advertising pixels, no Facebook pixel, no Google Analytics, no session recording, no fingerprinting.

Cookies, local storage and offline copies

HomeStats does not set any cookies. It keeps a few things in your browser, on your device only, and none of them is ever sent to us:

• hs-theme (local storage): whether you chose the light or dark theme.
• homestats-listen (local storage): the voice and reading speed you picked for Listen, saved only once you change them.
• homestats-pwa-dismissed (local storage): that you clicked “No thanks” on the offer to install HomeStats as an app, so it is not shown again.
• Offline copies (Cache Storage): our service worker keeps the homepage, an offline page, the last 40 pages you opened, and the scripts, styles and images those pages load, so they still open without a connection. It does not keep our data files or the search index. Pages are always fetched fresh when you are online, and their copies are only used when you are not.
• The Ask AI model (Cache Storage): only if you press “Run on my device”. The model you pick is kept so it downloads once. What you type is not stored.

The offline copies amount to a list of the HomeStats pages you opened recently, visible to anyone who uses the same browser profile. You can clear all of it at any time in your browser’s site-data settings. HomeStats then forgets your settings, and Ask AI downloads its model again the next time you run it. The cookie policy lists each item and how long it lasts.

Server logs

Netlify, our hosting provider, retains short-lived edge access logs (IP, user-agent, request path) for security and abuse prevention. We do not export, analyze, or store those logs ourselves. See Netlify's privacy policy for their retention schedule.

Requests to our /api/ endpoints are also counted per IP address, in the edge server’s memory, to enforce the published rate limit. That count is never written to disk or exported, and it is gone when the edge worker restarts.

Third-party content

Two features make your browser contact another company’s servers directly. Each of those servers sees your IP address and browser details, as any website you visit does. None of them receives anything you type, and none sets a cookie through HomeStats.

• The map page loads map tiles from basemaps.cartocdn.com (CARTO) in the dark theme, which is the default, or from tile.openstreetmap.org in the light theme. It also loads state and county outlines from raw.githubusercontent.com (GitHub). See the CARTO, OpenStreetMap and GitHub privacy policies.
• Ask AI, only after you press “Run on my device”, downloads its runtime from esm.run and cdn.jsdelivr.net (jsDelivr), the model from huggingface.co (Hugging Face) and model code from raw.githubusercontent.com (GitHub). The model then runs on your device, and your question and its answer never leave it. See the jsDelivr and Hugging Face privacy policies.

Listen uses your browser’s own text-to-speech. Some browsers also offer online voices run by the browser maker (in Chrome, the voices named “Google”; in Edge, the ones marked “Online”). If you pick one of those, the page text being read aloud is sent to that company to be spoken. Other voices run on your device.

External links to data sources (Redfin, FRED, Census, FHFA, BLS, HUD, BEA) open in a new tab and are governed by those publishers' policies.

RSS, JSON Feed, and AI crawlers

We publish open feeds at /feed.xml and /feed.json, and a per-state JSON data layer under /data/. We allow AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, etc.) — see robots.txt and ai.txt.

Children

HomeStats is a general-audience data site and not directed at children under 13. The only things this site can collect are a contact-form message or an email somebody chooses to send, and we do not knowingly accept either from a child under 13. If you believe a child has contacted us, email us and we will delete it.

Your rights, and the laws people ask about

You have the right to access any personal information we hold about you, the right to correct it, the right to delete it, and the right to opt out of any processing. In practice these are unusually easy requests to answer here: unless you have written to us, we hold nothing that identifies you, so the honest answer to "what do you have about me" is almost always "nothing".

California (CCPA and CPRA). These apply to businesses far larger than this one, so as written they do not cover us. We would honour a request anyway. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Europe and the United Kingdom (GDPR and UK GDPR). If you are in the EU or the UK you may request access, correction, deletion, restriction or portability, or object to processing. Because this is a static site that sets no cookies and runs no analytics, there is normally no personal data to act on.

Contact

Questions? Email joshua.a.watte@gmail.com or see security.txt for security disclosures.