Privacy

Updated October 17, 2026: the public reading pages now show one banner ad (see Advertising).

Storm Ledger has no accounts and asks for no email address. Most pages set no cookie. Pages with a form (the Ledger Watch pages) set one short-lived security cookie that stops forged form posts; it holds nothing about you and expires within a day.

Ledger Watches

A watch keeps what you chose (its name, counties, kinds and size limits) and when it was last opened or its feed was read. Its 12-character code appears only in your link; we store a one-way hash of it, so we cannot rebuild your link. Anyone with the link can open the watch, so keep it private. Watches not opened or read for 400 days are deleted; you can delete yours at any time. A deleted watch leaves the site at once and our nightly database backups within 14 days.

Lookups

Near-a-place lookups are not saved. The place and dates you pick travel in the page address, so they can appear in your browser history and in the web server's logs like any page address.

Counters and logs

To stop abuse the site counts lookups and new watches per day per address, stored only as a salted one-way hash and deleted after two days. The host keeps web server logs for security and trims them on a schedule.

The reports

Storm reports are public National Weather Service products. Some name where an observer was ("2 W Parma") or what was damaged; they do not name private people, and Storm Ledger adds nothing to them.

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 Storm Ledger (the home page, All reports, Counties, the county, storm-day and report pages, the Near a place page before you look up a place, 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 reports. Ledger Watch pages (making, opening, feeds and exports), near-a-place results, date-of-loss sheets, 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 day 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.