OpenDrop Privacy Notice

Last updated 29 June 2026

OpenDrop is a community-owned, open-data map of clothing-donation locations. It is built to need as little personal data as possible. There are no user accounts, no advertising, and no third-party analytics or tracking pixels.

What we collect

Location and photo contributions you submit. When you add a location, suggest a correction, rate a spot, or upload a photo, we store that contribution and the time it was made. This is community data and is published as open data (see below).
A salted hash of your IP address. We do not store your IP address. Each write is tagged with a one-way SHA-256 hash of your IP combined with a secret salt. We use it only to (a) rate-limit abuse, and (b) count one vote per person per location. It is not reversible to your IP and is never shared.
Anti-bot verification. Submissions are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile. Turnstile’s own processing is governed by Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
Standard server logs. Our web server records request metadata (path, status, a random per-request id, timing) for reliability and security. These rotate and are not used to build profiles.

What we deliberately do not collect

Your precise location. The “I’m standing here” feature computes the distance to a pin entirely on your device. Your GPS coordinates never leave your browser — the server receives only a single yes/no flag indicating whether you were within range. Coordinates are never sent, stored, correlated, or sold.
Photo metadata. Every uploaded photo is re-encoded server-side, which strips all EXIF metadata — including any embedded GPS coordinates and camera details — before the image is stored.
Names, emails, phone numbers, or payment details. We never ask for them and there is nowhere to enter them.

How long we keep it & how it’s purged

Community contributions (locations, corrections, ratings, photos) are retained as long as the map carries them, because they are the map. The salted IP hash attached to a contribution is retained alongside it, because it is the key that prevents one person from voting many times; on its own it is an irreversible hash, not an identifier.

Our primary privacy lever is salt rotation: rotating the secret IP_HASH_SALT permanently severs every stored hash from any future IP, making the historical hashes unlinkable to any person. Operators may also purge old rows from the abuse-prevention queues (e.g. resolved reports) on a rolling basis. Photos removed by moderators are unlinked from storage.

Open data

The location dataset is published under the Open Database License (ODbL), with attribution to OpenStreetMap and other sources embedded in the export. Contributions you make become part of this open dataset. Please do not submit anything you are not willing to publish openly.

Your choices

You can use the map fully without contributing anything.
You can retract your own rating for a spot at any time from its details panel.
To request removal of a specific contribution or photo, use the Report button on the item, or contact us below.

Source code

OpenDrop is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0). In keeping with §13 of that license, the complete corresponding source for this running service is available at github.com/WanderingAstronomer/OpenDrop.

Contact

Questions or removal requests: privacy@opendrop.example.