Privacy Policy
Effective May 12, 2026.
OpenFuel is a crowdsourced map of gas and alternative-fuel stations and their prices. This page explains what information we collect when you use openfuel.app, how we use it, who we share it with, and how you can access, export, or delete it.
Who we are
OpenFuel is operated by Anthony Zachman, a sole proprietor based in California, doing business as “OpenFuel” (“OpenFuel,” “we,” “us”). Questions about this policy or about your data can be sent to support@openfuel.app.
What we collect
We only collect what we need to run the service. Specifically:
Account information
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Your email address and a salted password hash (handled by our authentication provider, Supabase Auth — we never see your raw password).
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A display name you choose. You can change it any time in account settings.
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An optional short bio (up to 280 characters) and avatar image you choose to upload.
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Whether your profile is public. When set to private, you appear as "Anonymous" on every public surface and your profile page returns a not-found error.
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Trust score, contribution totals, and a "founder" flag — derived from your activity, not anything you submit directly.
Location data
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When you tap "Use my location" or submit a price, your browser asks your permission to share your current latitude and longitude with us.
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Submission location is used only to verify, on our server, that you are within roughly 500 yards of the station you are submitting a price for. This is the geofence required to keep the database honest.
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When you submit a price, your geofence-checked coordinates are stored alongside that submission so we can enforce per-account rate limits and audit suspicious activity. We do not display your location publicly.
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We do not run any background location tracking. Your location is only requested when you actively initiate an action that needs it (centering the map, submitting a price, confirming a price, reporting a fuel that is not sold).
Photos
When you submit a price using the photo flow, the photo of the station’s pump or pole sign is uploaded to our private storage bucket and sent to Google’s Gemini Vision model so it can extract the prices for you. Treat photos as an optical-character-recognition aid, not as long-term evidence:
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Photos uploaded through the in-app quick-submit flow (the camera button in the top navigation) are deleted from our storage automatically as soon as you confirm and submit the prices. The price record stores no link back to the photo file.
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In a small number of legacy cases — for example, an older direct-upload submission — the photo URL may be retained on the price record itself so the public price has a verifiable origin. You can request deletion of any retained photo by emailing us; see "Your rights" below.
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We strongly recommend you do not include people, license plates, or other identifying information in submission photos. If you accidentally do, contact us and we will remove the photo.
Submissions, confirmations, and reports
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Each price you submit is stored permanently and publicly with the price, fuel type, posted-as type (cash / credit / single), the station, the timestamp, and the display name on your account at the time of submission. Prices are append-only by database trigger; we cannot edit a posted price, only mark it outdated.
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Each price confirmation, fuel-not-sold report, and missing-station report you file is associated with your account so we can prevent abuse, calculate your trust score, and credit your contributions on the leaderboards.
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Saved or favorited stations are stored against your account and are visible only to you.
Device and product analytics
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We use PostHog to record anonymous, aggregated product analytics — for example, which screens are visited, how many submissions are completed per day, and what filters are commonly used. PostHog autocapture is disabled, which means we do not capture form-field contents, click-through-rates on every element, or session recordings. Analytics are linked to your user id only after you sign in.
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We use Sentry to capture application errors. Error reports include the URL, the error message, a stack trace, the browser and operating-system name, and the user id of the signed-in user (if any). Sentry is configured to scrub form data and to drop known bot-driven WebGL errors.
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Your browser’s standard request headers (IP address, user-agent string) reach our hosting providers in the normal course of any web request. We do not log them in our application database.
What we do not collect
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We do not place advertising trackers, retargeting pixels, or third-party advertising cookies. There are no ads on OpenFuel.
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We do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone.
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We do not collect financial information. We do not handle payments.
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We do not track you across other websites.
How we use what we collect
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To operate the service: render the map, accept and display prices, run the geofence check, send confirmation emails, and respond to your requests.
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To enforce safety and fairness: rate-limit submissions, calculate trust scores, detect spam or vandalism, and run the 5-vote fuel-correction system that allows the community to correct stale fuel listings.
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To improve the product: understand which features are used and which are not, and to find and fix bugs.
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To comply with the law: respond to lawful subpoenas, court orders, or government requests when we are legally required to do so.
We do not use your data for automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on you.
Who we share it with
OpenFuel is built on top of a small number of vendor services. We share with each only what they need to do their job:
Infrastructure and product processors
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Supabase, Inc. — hosts our PostgreSQL database, authentication, file storage, and serverless functions. All account information, submissions, and photos pass through Supabase. Supabase runs on Amazon Web Services in the United States.
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Vercel, Inc. — serves the openfuel.app web application. Vercel sees the standard request metadata for every page load.
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Mapbox, Inc. — serves the map tiles you see in the app. Mapbox receives the bounding box of the map view you are looking at and the standard request metadata. Mapbox does not receive your account information.
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Google LLC (Gemini Vision API) — receives the photo you upload at submission time so it can extract prices. The photo is sent over an encrypted connection. Google does not receive your account information.
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Resend, Inc. — sends transactional emails from no-reply@openfuel.app, including signup confirmation, password reset, and email-change links. Resend receives your email address and the contents of those messages.
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Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) — receives application error reports, including the message, stack trace, current URL, and (when signed in) your user id.
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PostHog, Inc. — receives anonymous product-usage events. After you sign in, events are tagged with your user id so we can analyze cohort behavior.
Each of these vendors is contractually limited, by their standard data-processing terms, to using your data only to provide their service to us. We do not authorize them to use your data for their own marketing or for any other purpose.
Public, by design
OpenFuel is a public, crowdsourced database. Some information you provide is published openly on the site so other users can benefit:
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The price, fuel type, posted-as designation, station, and timestamp of every submission you make.
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Your display name (or "Anonymous" if your profile is set to private), shown next to your submissions and confirmations and on the leaderboards and coverage map.
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Your bio, avatar, contribution totals, and held territories (if your profile is set to public).
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Aggregated, anonymized statistics such as total stations covered or total submissions in the last week.
Third-party data shown on the map
Some of the information you see on OpenFuel is sourced from public datasets and is shown subject to the upstream license:
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Station locations and tags are sourced in part from OpenStreetMap contributors and are made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The map shows the required "© OpenStreetMap contributors" attribution.
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Alternative-fuel station information is sourced in part from the U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC), which publishes its data in the public domain.
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Map tiles are served by Mapbox; their attribution control is shown on the map.
Cookies and similar technologies
We use only the cookies and local-storage entries we need to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences (active filters, chosen time window, dismissed prompts). We do not use third-party advertising cookies. PostHog and Sentry use first-party storage to associate events with the same browser session; both are limited scope and are not used for cross-site tracking.
Your rights and choices
You have the following rights regarding your information:
Access and correction
You can view and edit your display name, bio, avatar, public-profile toggle, and password from the in-app account settings page. Your full submission history is visible on your profile page.
Export
You can request a copy of the personal information associated with your account at any time by emailing support@openfuel.app from the address on your account. We aim to respond within thirty days.
Deletion
You can delete your account at any time from the in-app account settings page. When you do:
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Your authentication record, profile, bio, avatar, saved stations, navigation history, fuel-correction reports, and rate-limit records are permanently deleted.
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Your submitted prices and price-confirmations are anonymized — the price itself remains on the public record (so the price history of each station stays intact, which is the point of an append-only crowdsourced database), but it is no longer associated with your account or display name.
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Backups may retain a copy of deleted data for up to thirty days before being overwritten.
If you cannot use the in-app deletion flow, email support@openfuel.app from the address on your account and we will process the deletion manually.
Opt out of public visibility
Toggle “Public profile” off in account settings. With it off, your display name is replaced by “Anonymous” everywhere it would otherwise appear (leaderboards, station-card attribution, the coverage map), and your profile page returns a not-found error. You will still be scored normally on the leaderboards; only the name attached to the score is hidden.
Opt out of analytics
Browsers that send the standard “Do Not Track” signal are honored where supported. If you would like us to suppress all non-essential analytics for your account, email support@openfuel.app and we will set the corresponding flag.
California residents (CCPA / CPRA)
If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what personal information we have collected about you, the right to delete it, the right to correct it, the right to know what categories of third parties we have shared it with, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. To exercise these rights, email support@openfuel.app from the address on your account or use the deletion flow described above.
EEA, UK, and Swiss residents (GDPR / UK GDPR)
If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, you have rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict the processing of, and port your personal data, and to object to processing based on legitimate interests. The lawful basis we rely on is your consent (for location, photos, and analytics) and our legitimate interest in running an honest crowdsourced database (for rate-limit and anti-abuse logging). To exercise these rights, email support@openfuel.app. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.
Data retention
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Account information is retained for as long as your account exists. After deletion, it is removed within thirty days, including from backups.
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Submitted prices are retained indefinitely as part of the public price history. After your account is deleted, the prices remain but are no longer linked to you.
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Submission photos uploaded through the quick-submit flow are deleted from storage as soon as the submission completes successfully.
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Server logs and rate-limit records are retained for up to ninety days for abuse prevention and debugging, then purged.
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Analytics events in PostHog are retained per PostHog's default retention.
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Error reports in Sentry are retained per Sentry's default retention (currently ninety days for the free tier).
Security
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All traffic between your browser and openfuel.app is encrypted in transit (HTTPS / TLS).
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All traffic between our servers and our vendors (Supabase, Google, Mapbox, Resend, Sentry, PostHog) is encrypted in transit.
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Passwords are never stored in plain text. Supabase Auth stores only a salted password hash.
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Database access is gated by row-level security policies that restrict every record to its owner unless the record is meant to be public (such as a posted price).
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Secret API keys (Gemini, Resend, AFDC, Mapbox-server) are stored only in our serverless function environment and are never shipped to your browser.
No system is perfectly secure. If you discover a vulnerability, please report it to support@openfuel.app and give us a reasonable opportunity to fix it before disclosing it publicly.
International data transfers
OpenFuel is operated from the United States. All of our hosting and processor vendors store and process data in the United States. If you access OpenFuel from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to, processed in, and stored in the United States, which may have data protection laws different from those in your country.
Children's privacy
OpenFuel is intended for users who are at least 18 years old. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child under 18 has provided personal information to us, please contact support@openfuel.app and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy as the product changes. When we do, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. For material changes, we will also display an in-app notice on the map screen for at least thirty days. Your continued use of the service after a change takes effect means you accept the revised policy.
Contact
For any privacy-related question, request, or complaint:
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Email: support@openfuel.app
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Operator: Anthony Zachman, sole proprietor, doing business as OpenFuel, California, USA.