🌍 Privacy Policy

Global Mood Map (moodmap.earth) · Effective July 16, 2026

Global Mood Map shows how the world feels using anonymous mood reports. It is designed so that there is no personal data to protect in the first place. This page describes exactly what the service processes, in plain language. The source code is public, so every claim here can be checked.

What a mood report contains

• A mood (one of eight emoji), an optional tag from a fixed list, and a timestamp.
• A coarse location cell: your position is snapped to a ~55 km grid square before anything is stored. Precise coordinates are never written to disk, memory beyond the request, or logs.
• Nothing else. No account, no name, no email, no device identifier. Reports cannot be linked to each other or to you.

Your IP address

When you report without picking a location, your IP is used in memory, for that request only, to estimate a coarse area (via a local GeoLite2 database — your IP is never sent to any third party) and for rate limiting. It is never stored, logged, or associated with a report.

Anonymity thresholds

• Regions with fewer than 5 reports in a time window are never displayed or returned by the API.
• Sparse hourly data within a region is suppressed, so individual reports cannot be isolated.

Your personal mood history

The "My mood log" feature stores your own reports in your browser's local storage only. It never leaves your device, and we cannot see it. Clearing your browser data deletes it.

Cookies & retention

No cookies, no analytics trackers, no fingerprinting. Aggregated report data is kept for a rolling 48 hours, then deleted — from memory and from disk.

Simulated data

While the SIMULATED DATA badge is visible, the reports on the map are generated by a built-in world simulator, not real people. Real reports blend into the same anonymous pipeline.

Third parties

• Basemap tiles: loaded by your browser from CARTO (or maplibre.org demo tiles as fallback). Their privacy policies apply to those requests.
• Hosting: the server runs on Fly.io; standard infrastructure request handling applies.
• Nothing else. No ad networks, no social trackers, no data brokers — and no individual-level data exists to sell.

Changes & contact

Changes to this policy will be posted here with a new effective date. Questions or concerns: open a GitHub issue.