Privacy policy

The short version

PlaceRoot is an MCP server you run on your own machine. There's no PlaceRoot account, no sign-up, and no API key. We don't operate a backend, and nothing about your queries — what you searched for, where, or when — is sent to us. There is no "us" in the data path: PlaceRoot's own code sends nothing anywhere.

Data collection practices

PlaceRoot the software collects nothing and phones home to nothing. It has no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no update-check pinging a server we control. We only learn PlaceRoot exists on your machine if you tell us — an email, a GitHub issue, a support request.

Usage and storage — what actually leaves your machine

PlaceRoot's tools answer by querying Overture Maps' public data release directly from your machine, over DuckDB's HTTPS reads against Overture's Amazon S3 bucket (overturemaps-us-west-2, part of AWS's Registry of Open Data — anonymous, no key). That means:

• Your query's bounding box and the parquet files it needs to read are visible to AWS (or your configured mirror), the same way any file download is visible to the host serving it — your IP address, the URL requested, standard HTTP request metadata.
• If you set PLACEROOT_UPSTREAM_BASE to point at a mirror instead (your own bucket, or someone else's), that operator sees the same thing in AWS's place. PlaceRoot itself doesn't choose or contact a mirror unless you configure one.
• We (PlaceRoot / Vibe Mapper) are not a party to any of these requests. We don't run the Overture bucket, we don't run a mirror by default, and we don't see this traffic.

Nothing else leaves your machine. There's no second request to a PlaceRoot-operated server, no shadow API, no usage ping.

Local storage

PlaceRoot keeps an on-disk cache of the map tiles it downloads, so repeat queries over the same area answer from disk in milliseconds instead of re-fetching. By default it lives at ~/.cache/placeroot (override with PLACEROOT_CACHE_DIR), is capped at 500 MB by default (PLACEROOT_CACHE_MAX_MB) with the oldest tiles evicted once it's full, and can be turned off entirely with PLACEROOT_CACHE=off. It's a plain directory of parquet files on your disk — delete it any time, nothing is uploaded from it, and nothing depends on it persisting. Full detail: docs/REFERENCE.md.

PlaceRoot's render_map tool can also write self-contained HTML map files to a local artifact directory (a sibling of the cache directory). Those stay on your disk too, under your control, and are never uploaded anywhere.

Third-party sharing

We don't share data with third parties because we don't collect any to share. The only parties who see anything are the ones your own machine talks to directly to answer a query — Overture's AWS-hosted public dataset, or a mirror you explicitly configured — exactly as described above. That's between you and them, on the same terms as downloading any public file over HTTPS; PlaceRoot introduces no additional party into that exchange.

Data retention

There's nothing server-side to retain — we don't operate a server that sees your queries. On your machine, the tile cache persists until it's evicted by the size cap, disabled, or you delete the directory yourself. That's the entire retention story.

The placeroot.dev website

This site is static HTML — no accounts, no cookies, no forms, no analytics script. It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages, so Cloudflare serves the pages and, like any web host, may log basic request data (IP address, requested path, timestamp, user agent) for operating and securing the service. We don't add anything to that; there's no PlaceRoot-side tracking layered on top.

Changes to this policy

If this changes — a new optional feature that talks to a new host, for instance — we'll update this page and its effective date. This page lives in the project's git repository, so the honest way to check what changed is the file's history on GitHub.