Privacy
Short and plain.
The listings pages do not ask you for anything and do not need an account.
If you use the update form or the add a listing form, we keep what you type so we can check it. Your email is used only to ask you a question about that message. We never publish it and never sell it. We keep suggestions for up to a year.
To stop spam we keep a scrambled code made from your connection, never the connection itself, and we delete it after a day.
Please do not put personal details about people who received help into either form.
Counting visits
To know which pages help people, and to show advertisers the size of our audience, we count page views, taps on the Call, Directions and Website buttons, and views and taps on ads. These are plain daily totals, for example “12 taps on Call for this pantry today”. We do not use cookies, we do not keep your connection address or device, and we cannot tell who you are.
We never record which crisis, safety, shelter or recovery listing you looked at, or whether you tapped its buttons. We also skip counting entirely if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
Our AI connector
If you ask an AI assistant such as Claude to search HelpByState through our connector, it sends us only the place and the kind of help you asked about. We keep a daily count of the kind of help and the county, and nothing else: no name, no account, no message text, no connection address. Questions about safety, shelter, addiction or mental health are never counted.