What H2Oh! collects, and what it doesn’t
Last updated 14 September 2026 · Applies to h2ohwater.org and the H2Oh! web app
The short version. You can look up any city on H2Oh! without giving us anything. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no session recording anywhere on this site. We do not sell your information and we do not share it for advertising. The only personal information we hold is what you deliberately hand us — an email address for the alerts waitlist, or a browser push subscription.
On this page
1. Who we are
H2Oh! is an independent project that takes publicly available drinking-water records published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and by state agencies, and presents them in plain language. We are not a government agency, a water utility, a testing laboratory, a healthcare provider, or an emergency service.
[INFORMATION NEEDED FROM FOUNDER] — the legal entity operating H2Oh!, its state of formation, and a business mailing address must be inserted here before launch. A physical postal address is separately required by the CAN‑SPAM Act in any commercial email we send.
Privacy questions and requests: [INFORMATION NEEDED FROM FOUNDER — dedicated privacy contact address]. Until a dedicated address exists, requests reach us through the contact link on the home page.
2. What we collect
Information you give us
| What | When | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | When you join the water-alerts waitlist | Yes, for that feature |
| Name | Same form | No — optional, used only to address you in email |
| City or ZIP you were viewing | Submitted with the waitlist form | Yes — it is what the alert would be about |
| Browser push subscription | Only if you grant notification permission | Optional |
| Questions you type to the Water Assistant | Only if you use the chat feature | Optional |
Information collected automatically
- IP address. Our API receives your IP address with every request, as any web server does. We use it for rate limiting — a short-lived in-memory counter, kept for about sixty seconds, to stop one visitor overwhelming the service. It is not used to build a profile of you and it is not combined with your email address.
- Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard request logs, which can include IP addresses and the paths requested. These are operational logs held by the provider on their retention schedule.
- Approximate location, only if you ask for it. If you press “use my location,” your browser asks your permission and then sends your coordinates to our API, which forwards them to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to convert them into a ZIP code. We do not store the coordinates. If you never press that button, we never receive your location.
What we never collect
We do not ask for and do not want your home address, your date of birth, your phone number, any government identifier, any payment information, or any health information about you or your household. The site has no user accounts and no passwords. The “household” selections in the app — kids, pregnancy, older adults, pets — never leave your browser; they change which general guidance is shown on your screen and are not transmitted to us or stored.
3. Why we collect it
- Email address and city — so we can tell you when water alerts become available, and later send alerts for that place if you still want them. Nothing else. We do not sell, rent, trade, or share email addresses, and we do not use them for advertising.
- Name — only to address you by name in an email. Leave it blank and everything still works.
- Push subscription — so your browser can be sent a notification.
- Chat messages — to generate an answer. See third parties for where those messages go.
- IP address — abuse prevention and keeping the service up.
4. How long we keep it
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Waitlist email, optional name, city, signup date | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, or until we shut the alerts feature down. Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe link that deletes the record immediately — it does not merely flag it. |
| Browser push subscription | Held in server memory only. It is discarded whenever the service restarts, and revoking notification permission in your browser ends it. |
| Rate-limiting IP counters | About 60 seconds, in memory. |
| Chat messages | Not stored by H2Oh!. See Anthropic’s retention terms below. |
| Geolocation coordinates | Not stored. |
| Cached water-quality records | Up to 24 hours. This is public agency data about water systems, not about you. |
5. Third parties
These are every outside service involved in running H2Oh!. None of them are advertising networks, and none of them receive your information for their own marketing.
| Service | Role | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosts the website | Your IP address and request details, as any web host does |
| Railway | Hosts our API | Same, for API requests |
| Upstash (Redis) | Stores the waitlist and caches public water data | Your email, optional name, city, signup date |
| Brevo | Sends the confirmation email | Your email and optional name |
| Anthropic | Powers the Water Assistant chat | The messages you type and the public water data for the city you are viewing |
| OpenStreetMap / Nominatim | Turns coordinates into a ZIP code | Your coordinates — only if you press “use my location” |
| Google Fonts | Serves the typefaces | Your IP address and browser details when the font files load. Sets no cookies. |
| Cloudflare cdnjs and jsDelivr | Serve JavaScript libraries and the U.S. map outline | Your IP address and browser details. Set no cookies. |
| Google News (RSS) | Supplies related news headlines | Nothing about you — our server makes this request, your browser does not |
| EPA, state agencies, NOAA | Supply the water records themselves | Nothing about you — our server makes these requests |
Links out to other sites — a utility, a state health department, NSF International, a retailer — take you somewhere we do not control and whose privacy practices are their own.
6. Cookies and local storage
H2Oh! sets no cookies. No analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no pixels, no fingerprinting, no session recording. That is why you have not been shown a cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to and nothing to withdraw. We would rather not show you a consent dialog that does nothing than perform compliance at you.
The app does store two small values in your browser’s local storage. They stay on your device, are readable only by this site, and are never sent to us:
h2oh_saved_zip— the ZIP you chose to save, so the app can offer it next visit. Saved only when you press the save control, and removable from the same place.h2oh-theme— whether you picked light or dark.
To clear both at any time: use the “Clear saved data” control in the app’s menu, or clear site data for h2ohwater.org in your browser settings. Everything keeps working without them.
7. Your choices and rights
These are available to everyone who uses H2Oh!, wherever you live. We are not making you prove a state of residence first.
- Know what personal information we hold about you.
- Get a copy of it.
- Correct it if it is wrong.
- Delete it — see below.
- Opt out of email at any time, from the link in every message.
- Turn off push notifications in your browser’s site settings.
- Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these. The lookup tool is free and stays free either way.
We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do no profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. So there is nothing for you to opt out of on those fronts, and we have deliberately not added a “Do Not Sell or Share” link that would imply otherwise.
8. Deleting your information
There are two working routes, and neither requires an account:
- Unsubscribe link. Every email we send contains one. Following it deletes your waitlist record outright — name, email, city and all — not just a flag saying “don’t send.”
- Email us. Write to the privacy contact above from the address you signed up with, and we will delete the record and confirm. We aim to complete requests within 30 days. If we cannot verify the request came from you, we will say so rather than act on it — that protects you from someone else deleting or requesting your data.
Local storage on your device is yours to clear directly and we have no access to it.
9. Children
H2Oh! is a household utility tool intended for adults. It is not directed to children under 13, we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and nothing on the site is designed to appeal to children rather than to the adults responsible for a household.
If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has given us an email address, write to the privacy contact and we will delete it promptly. Because the only thing we could hold is an email address on a waitlist, deletion is complete and immediate.
10. Security
The site and API are served over HTTPS. Administrative endpoints require a secret key. Inputs are validated and length-limited. We keep the amount of personal information we hold small on purpose, because the safest data is the data that was never collected.
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not send us sensitive personal or health information — we do not need it and have no place to put it.
11. State privacy laws
Several U.S. states — among them California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Texas — have comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Whether any of them applies to H2Oh! depends on thresholds such as revenue and the number of consumers whose data is processed.
[REQUIRES REVIEW BY QUALIFIED COUNSEL] — we have deliberately not asserted that any particular statute does or does not apply, and we have not invented a rights table to look compliant. Instead we have described what we actually do and made the rights above available to everyone. If H2Oh! crosses an applicability threshold, this section and our practices need a lawyer’s review, not a template.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle information you have already given us — for example if we ever began sharing email addresses with anyone — we will email everyone on the waitlist before it takes effect, rather than relying on you to re-read this page.