Privacy Notice
Last updated September 2026
Palawan Watch is an open conservation project. This explains everything we record: what happens if you sign up for alerts, and what happens when anyone simply visits the site. We try to keep it plain, and we would rather over-explain than leave something out.
If you sign up for alerts
We collect your email address, and nothing else. We don't ask for your name or anything about you. We use it only to email you when our satellite monitoring detects deforestation, fires, or mining activity in the areas we watch. We will never sell it or share it for anyone else's purposes.
Your email is stored with Resend, which manages the list and sends the emails on our behalf. We do not store it anywhere else, and we keep it until you unsubscribe.
Our legal basis is your consent: you are only added after ticking the box on the signup form. We never pre-tick it and never add anyone who didn't ask to be.
When anyone visits the site
This part applies whether or not you ever sign up, so it matters that we are straight about it. The site keeps a live activity feed: for page views, a short line is posted to a private channel on Discord that the people running the project can see. That line contains:
- the page path you opened (for example
/compare.html); - the country your request came from, as reported by our host;
- the site that linked you here, if any — the domain only, never the full link;
- for visits that appear to be people, the organisation that owns the network you are on — and only when that is a company, government body or institution. Ordinary home and mobile internet providers are deliberately filtered out, because nearly every genuine reader is on one.
It does not contain your IP address, your name, a cookie, a session identifier, a device identifier, or anything you typed. We do not use it to build a profile of you, and we cannot tell who you are from it. Your browser's user-agent is read in passing to tell people apart from search crawlers and AI agents, but it is not written into the feed. Posts are rate-limited, so a burst of page views does not produce a burst of records.
We do this because knowing whether these alerts are reaching journalists, regulators, NGOs or the industry itself is the main way we can tell the project is working. Our legal basis is legitimate interests, and we have tried to keep the data to the minimum that serves that purpose. If you would rather not appear in it at all, you can email us and we will tell you how to be excluded.
Messages in that channel persist until they are deleted, and we review and clear them periodically. Discord hosts them for us.
Other services the page loads
Some parts of the site are loaded from other companies' servers. When your browser fetches them it reveals your IP address to those companies, which is how the web works, but you should know which ones:
- Cloudflare — hosts the site and serves every request.
- Google Fonts — the two typefaces the site uses.
- unpkg — the mapping library the live map runs on.
- Map imagery from Esri and NASA GIBS.
- On the before/after page only, place searches you type are sent to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim to turn them into coordinates.
The site sets no cookies of its own and runs no advertising or analytics trackers.
Your rights
- Unsubscribe any time — every email includes an unsubscribe link, and that removes you from the list.
- Access, correction or deletion — ask us what we hold about you, or to delete it.
- Object — you can object to the visitor activity feed, and we will honour it.
- In the EU/UK these are your rights under the GDPR. In the Philippines they are your rights under the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173), and you may complain to the National Privacy Commission. We act on requests promptly.
Contact
For any privacy request — access, objection, deletion, or just a question — email [email protected]. For factual corrections to anything published on the site, use [email protected].