Oregon Cams is an independent personal project, not a company. There are no accounts, no ads, and nothing here is sold or shared for advertising. This page explains what actually happens with your data when you use the site.
If you choose "Current location," your browser's own geolocation feature resolves your coordinates and puts them in the page's URL, rounded to about 100 meters (roughly a city block). That URL is sent to our server once, to work out which cameras are nearest to you. To speed up repeat requests from nearby visitors, we briefly cache the resulting camera list (not your exact coordinates) for a few minutes, keyed to a coarse area of roughly three-quarters of a mile, not to you individually. We never store your precise location beyond the request that resolves it.
When you load the site, we briefly use your IP address to apply a rate limit that protects the service from abuse. It's not logged permanently or linked to anything else you do.
Camera images are fetched by our own server and passed through to you, not loaded directly from ODOT by your browser. ODOT doesn't see your IP address when you view a camera image.
To show a camera's last hour as a timelapse, we save the images from many of the cameras as they update and keep them for up to a week, then delete them. The timelapse videos are stored and served by Cloudflare: on camera pages your browser loads the list of available timelapses, and any video you play, from Cloudflare directly, which briefly uses your IP address to block abusive traffic.
Opening the map view loads map tiles directly from our map provider, MapTiler, in your browser. That request goes to MapTiler directly, not through our server, so MapTiler's own privacy policy applies to it, not ours.
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless analytics tool, to see aggregate traffic and performance numbers like page views and load times. It doesn't use cookies or track you across sites. If you used "Current location," your coordinates are part of the page URL it measures.
We don't use cookies. Your light/dark mode preference is saved in your browser's local storage so it persists between visits, it stays on your device and is never sent to us.