Privacy Policy
This page explains the anonymous data WhatsAvailable.app collects when you visit, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have.
What we collect
When you visit WhatsAvailable.app, we use Google Analytics, a third-party analytics service, to understand site traffic: the pages you viewed, an approximate amount of time spent on the page, a general traffic source (e.g. "direct", "google"), and your approximate location. Google Analytics sets its own cookies and processes this data under Google's own privacy policy (see https://policies.google.com/privacy) -- we don't control what Google does with it beyond the reporting it provides us. A separate first-party cookie ("al_consent") remembers your accept/decline choice from the consent banner for up to a year, so you aren't asked again on every visit.
How we use your IP address
Every request to our server briefly processes your IP address to work out your country (and, in the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, whether the cookie-consent banner must be shown) by querying a geolocation lookup service -- ipwho.is, or ip-api.com if that is unavailable. Your IP address is sent to that lookup for this purpose and cached briefly to avoid repeat lookups; it is unrelated to the data Google Analytics separately collects when tracking is allowed.
Why we collect it
This data lets us understand which countries and pages are most used, spot broken pages, and see overall traffic trends so we can decide what to build and review next. It is used in aggregate -- we don't look at individual sessions to track a specific visitor.
How long we keep it
Data collected by Google Analytics is retained according to Google's own retention settings, not ours; see Google's privacy policy for details. We do not have a mechanism to look up or delete an individual visitor's Google Analytics data, because it isn't tied to your identity in the first place. If you'd rather not be counted at all, use the choices below.
Sharing with third parties
We do not sell your data. Google Analytics is the one third-party analytics service we use, and it receives the traffic data described above whenever tracking is allowed. The IP geolocation lookup described above (ipwho.is / ip-api.com) is a separate service that receives your IP address only to resolve a country for that single request -- it does not receive any of the data Google Analytics collects.
Your choices
Visitors in the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland see a cookie-consent banner on arrival and are only tracked by Google Analytics if they accept it; declining sets the al_consent cookie to "declined" and means Google Analytics never loads for that visit. Outside those jurisdictions, Google Analytics runs without a banner, consistent with the opt-out model those regions use rather than requiring opt-in consent. You can clear the al_consent cookie for this site, and any cookies set by Google Analytics, at any time from your browser settings. You can also install Google's official browser opt-out add-on to prevent Google Analytics from tracking you on any site.
Questions
For anything about this policy or how WhatsAvailable.app is run, see our About page.