Privacy and the rules this site is built to

If you are looking for a bed

You do not sign in. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and no advertising, and stores nothing in your browser. It does not ask for your location: you choose a state and a county yourself.

The choices under "Who needs a bed", including the box for someone fleeing domestic violence, are used inside your browser to sort the shelters on the page. They are never sent to the site or to anyone else.

Two companies see your connection, as with any web page. Cloudflare delivers the pages and processes the address your device connects from in order to do that. The street map behind the county shapes is drawn from OpenFreeMap, which receives that address and the part of the map you are viewing. Links to other sites are sent without the address of the page you came from.

If you are leaving violence

The location of a victim service project is never published here. It has no address, no city, no ZIP code and no pin, and the same holds for every other project run by that operator or housed in that building. The National Domestic Violence Hotline, 800-799-7233, places callers with shelters whose locations are not public.

The button marked "Leave this page" at the top of every page replaces this site with a weather page, and the Back button does not return here. It does not clear your browser's history. A private window, or a library computer, leaves less behind.

Shelter staff and referrers

A shelter reports two numbers per project each evening: beds open and beds offline. The report page has no field for a name, a birth date, a room or a note, and the service rejects anything that is not a whole number of beds.

An outreach worker or a discharge planner with a holding link can hold a bed for 90 minutes. A hold is a five-letter code and a number of beds. It carries no name and no description of the person. The person says the code at the door.

Each private link is stored only as a one-way hash, so the stored value cannot be turned back into the link. A link can be closed at any time.

Everything the database holds

Record	What is in it
Nightly count	Project, open beds, offline beds, time sent
Hold	Project, code, number of beds, time placed, time it lapses, how it ended
Bed check	Project, the count that stood, the count on the shelter's own log, time checked
Reporting or holding login	The organization's name, its state, its projects, the hash of its link
Shelter sign-up	The organization's name, its projects and one work email address. It is deleted on request to the study team.

No table holds a guest's name, age, sex, health, history or any other fact about a person who sleeps in a shelter or eats at a pantry. The site does not connect to any Homeless Management Information System and holds no data drawn from one.

What is never published

The location of a victim service project, its operator's other projects, or any project in its building. A check runs before every publish and stops it if a served file carries one.
A food site at one of those buildings, run by one of those operators, or named as a victim service.
An office address as if it were housing. Scattered-site and voucher programs are listed without a pin.
The name or personal email address of a staff member. Phone lines and role inboxes are published; people are not.

The rules the design follows

Rule	What it protects	What the site does
HUD's privacy and security standards for Homeless Management Information Systems	Personal information about people served by homeless programs	Holds none. Counts beds, never people, and takes nothing from an HMIS.
The confidentiality provisions of the Violence Against Women Act and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act	Survivors, and the location of the shelters that take them	Withholds every victim service location, and extends the withholding to the operator and the building.
Federal rules on substance use treatment records (42 CFR Part 2) and health information (HIPAA)	The fact that a named person is in treatment or care	A count or a hold never names or describes a person, so neither can show who is staying where.
HUD's Equal Access Rule	Access to shelter in line with a person's gender identity	"Who needs a bed" is answered as the person describes themselves. The marks on the page sort a list. Admission is the shelter's decision.
Children's online privacy rules	Personal information from children	Collects no personal information from any visitor of any age.
Accessibility standards for public information (WCAG 2.1 AA)	Use by people with disabilities	Every figure on the map is also in the text column, which works by keyboard and without the map.

A study that uses the reporting tools is governed separately, by the review board of the university that runs it. That review covers anything the study asks of shelter staff.