When you submit a status, you choose only your country and, if you want, your state or province — never a street address, ZIP/postal code, city, or GPS coordinate. We never request your device's exact location, and we never look at or store your real coordinates.
We then generate a completely random point somewhere inside that broad region and use that as your dot's position — not your real location. If you're in Canton, Mississippi, your dot might appear near Tupelo, near Hattiesburg, or anywhere else inside Mississippi. A dot on the map means “someone is approximately in this region doing this,” never “this is where this person is.” You can also choose “Country only” for even less precision.
Every time you submit or renew a status, you get a brand-new random point — we never try to keep your dot in the same place. If your status stays active for a while, we also quietly re-randomize its position within your region every 10-20 minutes, so a dot is never a stable stand-in for a real address over time.
When your status first appears, or disappears, that also happens on a short random delay of a few seconds to half a minute — so the exact moment a dot appears or vanishes on the public map is never a precise, reconstructable record of when you clicked a button.
RightNow Earth never asks your browser for GPS or precise location permission, and the site's Permissions-Policy header explicitly disables geolocation. Location is inferred entirely server-side from coarse network headers, or from what you choose yourself in the location picker.
We set one essential, HttpOnly cookie containing a random token — not tied to any account, email, or personal information. Its only purpose is to let you have one active status at a time, update or remove it, and to help prevent abuse. Before this token ever touches our database, it's one-way hashed; the raw value never leaves your cookie. The public map and its live feed never receive this identifier or any hash of it, and never receive a stable ID of any kind for your dot — every time your status changes or renews, it gets a brand-new public ID, so a dot can never be followed across changes.
You can remove your status at any time with Remove me from the map, and reset your anonymous identifier at any time by clearing your cookies for this site. There is no way for anyone — including us — to search for a specific person's dot, follow one over time, or see an individual's history of past locations.
Individual live statuses expire automatically (an hour by default) and are deleted on a schedule. We separately keep aggregate historical counts — how many people were doing what, grouped by time/activity/region — with no individual coordinates or identifiers in them at all, retained for a limited window (30 days by default) shown on the History page. We never expose exact timestamps publicly either — the map shows “Active now,” never a precise posting time.
When very few people are active in a small region, we deliberately show less detail rather than more — region-level activity breakdowns are withheld entirely until enough people are active there for individual patterns to blend in.
This site runs on Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database/realtime), and Cloudflare Turnstile (abuse prevention). If advertising is ever enabled, that provider will be named here too, and optional services never load before you've made a consent choice.
Reach us at [email protected]. We can't make legal guarantees we can't back up, but we can tell you plainly what the system does and doesn't do — this page is that explanation.