Privacy
Privacy
Updated October 17, 2026: the public reading pages now show one banner ad (see Advertising).
Where It Lands has no accounts and asks for no email address. Most pages set no cookie. Opening a page with a form (the Watch Desk pages) sets one short-lived security cookie that stops forged form posts; it holds no information about you and expires within a day.
Watch Desks. A desk keeps what you typed into it (name, counties, kind, agency, minimum, watch words) and when it was last opened. Its 12-character code is shown to you in the link and stored only as a one-way hash, so we cannot rebuild your link. Anyone with the link can open the desk, so keep it private. Desks not opened or fetched for 400 days are deleted; you can delete yours at any time with its Delete button. A deleted desk is gone from the site at once; copies of it leave our nightly database backups within 14 days.
Counters. To stop abuse the site counts forms sent per day per address, stored only as a salted one-way hash and deleted after two days. Web server logs are kept by the host for security and trimmed on a schedule.
Award data is federal public data. Awards go mostly to organizations; a sole proprietor holding a federal contract can appear under a personal or business name, exactly as the federal record shows it. This site does not read loans, direct payments or assistance awarded to individuals.
Nothing is sold or shared. There are no tracking cookies and no analytics services. The only outside service any page loads is the banner from adengine.us on the public reading pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total.
Advertising
The public reading pages of Where It Lands (the home page, Latest, Counties, the county and award pages, Pricing, and Sources and method) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC’s own services. The banner sits below the page’s content, apart from the award records. Watch Desk pages (making, opening, feeds, exports and the printable sheet), this page, the terms and error pages show no ad.
To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests. It is not told which page, county or search you had open.
- No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
- How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC’s own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
- What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
- Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser’s site, which has its own privacy policy.
- Nothing about you is sold or shared.