Privacy

What is collected, plainly

MapMinter records where radio signals were heard. That is inherently location data, and the only decent way to handle it is to say exactly what is stored, what is published, and what is never touched at all.

What a measurement contains

Each packet your device receives and uploads is stored with:

• Signal metadata: RSSI in dBm and SNR in dB for the received transmission, the number of hops it had taken, and the path identifier it carried.
• Radio settings: frequency, bandwidth, spreading factor, coding rate, and the recognised preset, because measurements are only comparable within the same settings.
• Your position at the moment of reception: latitude, longitude, optional altitude, an accuracy estimate, and where the position came from. This is the position of the receiver, which is you.
• Packet identity, not packet content: a hash of the packet, its type number and its length in bytes. The hash exists so the same packet heard by two collectors is recognised as one packet.
• Collector attribution: which collector uploaded it, the device model reported by the app, and the time it was recorded.

What is never collected

There are also no analytics scripts, no advertising, no tracking cookies and no third-party code on this site. The content pages you are reading load nothing from anywhere else; the map page additionally loads basemap tiles from CARTO, which means CARTO's servers see your IP address when the map draws, as they would for any site using their tiles.

Where node names and node positions come from

Nothing about a node is entered by us. MeshCore nodes broadcast adverts on the air containing a name, a type and often a position, and MapMinter records what it hears. Those adverts are public radio transmissions and they are unsigned, so a name is a claim rather than an identity. The map always displays a node's identifier beside its name and treats the name itself as untrusted text.

If a node broadcasts a position, that position ends up on the map. If you would rather it did not, the setting to change is on the node.

What is published

• Aggregated cells. The public map and its API serve measurements folded into H3 hexagonal cells: strongest and mean RSSI, best SNR, sample count and when the cell was last heard. Individual raw positions are not served to the public map.
• Nodes. Advertised name, type, advertised position and first/last heard.
• Contributor ranking. A collector's display name and short identifier appear on the top-contributors board, alongside how much it has mapped.

Aggregation is not anonymisation. A cell that only one person has ever driven is, in practice, a record that one person was there. Please collect with that in mind, and do not map a place you would not want associated with you.

How long it is kept

Raw measurements are retained because they are what the aggregates are rebuilt from, what attribution to a transmitter is recomputed from, and what an abuse investigation looks at. A fixed deletion window has not been set yet, and rather than print a number we have not committed to, this page says so and will be updated when it is set.

The web server keeps ordinary request logs. Removal requests for measurements or for a node are handled on request; see below.

To have your data and your account deleted, the steps, the address to write to and what stays behind are on the data deletion page.

Self-hosting changes all of this

Everything on this page describes the instance at mapminter.com. MapMinter is built to be self-hosted, and an operator running their own instance holds their own data under their own policy.

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