Privacy, in plain language

What a submission collects

When someone puts a business forward through Join the register, the form gathers:

• About the business — its name, the story of the work, the trade group and specialty, the town and state, a pin on the map, and optionally a street address, founding year, telephone, website, hours and tags.
• About the person sending it — a name and an email address, so we can ask about the listing.

That is the whole of it. There are no other forms.

What is public and what is not

Once a submission is reviewed and approved, the business details above are published on the map and on the listing page — that is the point of a directory.

The submitter’s email address is never published. It is used for one thing: writing to you about the listing — a question during review, or word of the outcome. The submitter’s name is kept with the submission for the same reason and is not shown on the listing.

No tracking, no analytics

This site runs no analytics, no advertising and no third-party trackers, and it sets no tracking cookies. We don’t follow you around the directory, and there is nothing to opt out of — there is nothing doing it.

The one cookie

Signed-in owners get a single session cookie so the site remembers who they are between pages. It exists only while you use the owner dashboard, it is never used to track you anywhere else, and signing out ends it. Browsing the directory needs no cookie at all.

Where the map tiles come from

The map is drawn from map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, but the images themselves are served through a caching proxy the register runs. Your browser asks our proxy for each tile; the proxy fetches it from OpenStreetMap’s tile servers on your behalf and keeps a copy for the next visitor. Your browser never talks to a third-party tile server directly.

As with any website, serving a page or a tile means our servers see the technical details of the request — your browser’s address and the time. We don’t build profiles from that.

Your position, when you ask for it

The directory’s near-me control asks your browser for your position, sorts the listings by distance, and forgets it. The position is used for that sort in the moment and is not stored.

Correcting or removing your information

A listing stays published for as long as the business is on the register, and the contact details that came with it are kept while it is, so we can reach the right person. Owners can edit their listings at any time from the owner dashboard. To correct or remove a listing — or the details behind it — write to hello@heritagemap.net.

Changes to this page

If what the site collects ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. That is the whole announcement mechanism — there is no mailing list.