What I collect
Practically nothing about you, specifically. The atlas has no accounts, no sign-up, no contact form, and no comment section. It does not ask for your name, your email, or your location.
There are, however, two places where loading any web page produces data the operator of that page has some access to:
- The web host’s edge servers necessarily see an IP address, a user-agent string, and a referrer if there was one - the same data every server sees on every request. I do not retain these beyond Vercel’s standard, time-limited request logs, which I don’t read.
- I use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views and roughly where in the world the atlas is being read from. The details are in the next section.
Vercel Web Analytics
A small first-party script (@vercel/analytics) runs on every page and sends one ping per page view to Vercel’s analytics endpoint. I use it because I’m curious how many people stumble onto this atlas and which countries they tend to click. I do not run it for advertising, remarketing, or A/B testing, and I don’t send any custom events of my own.
Per Vercel’s own privacy documentation:
- No cookies and no localStorage are set by the script.
- Visitors are not tracked across sessions or across sites. Vercel identifies a session by hashing the incoming request and discards that hash after 24 hours, so even Vercel cannot stitch your visits across days into a profile.
- The data points stored alongside each ping are: a timestamp, the URL and dynamic route, the referring page if any, filtered query parameters, an approximate geolocation (country, region, city) derived from your IP, your OS, your browser, and your device type.
What this means in practice: I can see, in aggregate, that “a few dozen people from Poland looked at the atlas yesterday and most of them clicked Brazil,” but I cannot see who you are, and I’m told Vercel cannot either.
If you’d rather not be counted, a standard tracker blocker (uBlock Origin, Brave Shields, or similar) will block the analytics script. The atlas itself will work unchanged - none of the data, geometry, or interactions depend on it.
What I don’t collect
- Your name, email, or anything resembling an account.
- Your precise location. The country/region/city guess derived from your IP by Vercel is the most specific information that reaches me, and I see it as a column in an aggregate dashboard, not against any identifier.
- Your scroll position, hover trail, or clicks per minute.
- A profile of you or your interests, for sale or otherwise.
Cookies and storage
The atlas sets zero cookies and writes nothing to localStorage or sessionStorage. Vercel Web Analytics is cookieless.
Where things load from
Everything the page renders - country geometry, per-country cause-of-death JSON, CSS, JavaScript, and the fonts you’re reading this in - is served from this site’s own domain. Fonts are downloaded at build time by Next.js and self-hosted alongside the rest of the assets, so no runtime request leaves your browser for Google Fonts or a font CDN.
The only outbound request a typical page makes, beyond loading the site itself, is the analytics ping to Vercel described above.
Your rights
Since I hold no personal data about you, there is nothing of yours to access, export, or delete. If you’ve written to me directly - for example by email - reply to the same thread and I’ll erase the correspondence.
If this changes
If what this site collects materially changes - say, I add a contact form, a comment section, or a different analytics tool - I’ll update this page and the “last updated” date at the bottom. The atlas does not run a newsletter, so you’d need to come back of your own accord to notice.
Contact
Questions about any of this? Reach me via GitHub or LinkedIn.
Last updated 18 May 2026.