Privacy policy

Last updated: 13 October 2026

QuakeIndex is published by Voitto Virta LLC. This policy says what we collect and why, in plain terms.

Your location

On the "was that an earthquake?" page you can choose to share your location. Your browser asks you first, and if you decline the page still works — you pick a state instead. When you do share it, the coordinates are sent to our own API to run the query and are not stored, not logged against you, and not passed to anyone else. We do not have accounts, so there is nothing to attach a location to.

The homepage estimates your area from your connection. So that it can lead with the earthquake near you rather than the largest one on the planet, the homepage asks our own server which city your IP address belongs to. The server looks the address up in a database stored on our own machine (IP geolocation by DB-IP), answers with a city and its rough coordinates, and does not store the address or the answer; the reply is marked so no cache keeps it. The page always says the guess came from your connection, and you can replace it with a ZIP code or town. Places you pick are kept in your own browser only.

Earthquake alerts

Town and earthquake pages offer browser notifications when USGS records an earthquake near a place you choose. They are off unless you turn them on: you press "Alert me", pick the place, the distance and the size, and only then does your browser ask whether to allow notifications. There is no account and no email.

To send them we store, on our own server: the push address your browser gives us (a link to your browser's own notification service: Google's for Chrome, Mozilla's for Firefox, Apple's for Safari), the keys that encrypt each message to your browser, the place you chose with its coordinates, your distance and size choices, the page you signed up on, and a record of which alerts were sent and which were opened. Every message is encrypted so only your browser can read it; the notification service sees when one is delivered, not what it says.

Stop them with "Stop alerts" on any town or earthquake page, with "Stop these alerts" on any notification, or by turning notifications off for this site in your browser. The subscription then ends and nothing more is sent. If your browser's notification service says the address no longer exists, we end it the same way. These alerts are not warnings and arrive after the shaking; for early warning see ShakeAlert.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to count page views and understand which pages people find useful. It sets cookies and processes data on Google's infrastructure. IP addresses are anonymised by Google before storage.

Advertising

QuakeIndex is paid for by advertising served by Google AdSense (see the advertising disclosure for the rules about where ads may appear). For the ads:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a visitor's prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
• You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, and out of many third-party vendors' cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info.
• Visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland are asked for consent through Google's certified consent message before any advertising cookie is set, and can change that choice at any time from the "Cookie settings" link in the footer.

How Google uses information from sites that show its ads is described in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services. Ads are never placed inside an earthquake page's answer, the "was that an earthquake?" answer, or a hazard result.

Our hosting and logs

The site, the API and the MCP server run on our own server at Google Cloud in the United States, with Cloudflare in front of it as a network and cache. Like any web server, both process the IP address and user agent of each request to deliver it and to protect against abuse. Our server's logs — the time, IP address, address requested, response status and user agent of each request — are rotated daily and deleted after 14 days. We use aggregate traffic counts; we do not build profiles of visitors and we do not sell data.

Our API

The API counts requests per IP address for up to two minutes in order to enforce rate limits. Those counters expire automatically and are not used for anything else.

AI assistants: our MCP server

The MCP server at https://quakeindex.com/mcp lets an AI assistant such as Claude look up earthquake data while you talk to it. It needs no account and no sign-in.

• What it receives. Only what the assistant sends to run one lookup: the name of the tool and its arguments — for example a ZIP code, a town and state, coordinates, a number of days, or an event id. Like any web request it also carries the IP address it came from (for a hosted assistant such as Claude, that is the assistant's server, not your device) and, at the start of a session, the name and version of the assistant's software. It never receives your conversation, your account with the assistant, your files, or anything the assistant does not put in that request.
• How it is used. The arguments are used to answer that request and then discarded: they are not stored and not logged. The server writes one line per request — the time, the IP address, the request line (POST /mcp) and the response status — to keep the service running and to spot abuse. For rate limiting it keeps a request counter per IP address in memory, and forgets an address after ten minutes without requests. The links in an answer carry tags naming the tool and the assistant family (for example utm_campaign=place_activity&utm_content=claude), read from the request's software name, so that we can count visits that come from those links. Nothing about you is in them, and the software name is not stored.
• Who else sees it. Nobody, beyond the providers that carry every request to this site, described under hosting below. There are no analytics, cookies or ads on the MCP server, and nothing from it is sold, rented or shared.
• How long it is kept. The arguments: not at all. The request lines: in our server logs, deleted after 14 days (see hosting).
• Questions or deletion requests: team at voittovirta.com.

What we never do

• We have no user accounts, so we hold no names, emails or passwords.
• We do not sell or rent data about visitors.
• We do not store the location you share on /felt/.
• We do not use alert subscriptions for anything but the alerts you chose.

Your rights, and how to use them

If you are in the EU, the UK or California you have rights over personal data about you. Because we hold no accounts and no location history, in practice there is very little for us to hold (beyond an alert subscription, if you made one) — but if you want to know what we have, or want it deleted, email team at voittovirta.com and we will answer.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

When this policy changes we update the date at the top. Material changes — adding analytics, or turning on advertising — will be described here before or as they happen, not afterwards.