Region privacy and the sources we check
Five public feeds: NWS, USGS, GDACS, IODA, and Cloudflare Radar. Your region is a rough 10 km area, never derived from IP or GPS.
Sources checked at outage time:
- U.S. National Weather Service: active severe weather alerts at your location (US only).
- USGS: significant earthquakes near you in the last 24 hours.
- GDACS: major global disaster events within roughly 300 km.
- IODA (Georgia Tech's internet outage observatory): detected internet disruptions in your region or country.
- Cloudflare Radar: confirmed internet outages and disruptions affecting your country, drawn from Cloudflare's global network vantage.
Privacy, plainly:
- Your region comes only from what you type, or from the optional automatic update. It is never derived from your IP address or precise GPS.
- With automatic updates on, your Mac reads its own location, rounds it to roughly a 10 km area on the device, and sends only that. Your precise location never leaves your Mac.
- The region updates only when you actually move, and clearing it removes it entirely.
- The feeds are only queried at the moment an outage is declared; there is no continuous lookup.