Privacy Policy

Map of Heroes is a public map. When a hero is approved, their page shows what the nominator chose to share: the hero’s name, their story and headline, their category, a city-level location (never a street address), and a photo if one was provided with permission. Approved guestbook messages show the author’s first name and their kind words. Everything else stays private.

We collect only what the site needs to work:

• Nominators: your name and email address, used to send your receipt, review updates, and payment-recovery links for your own nomination. Your email is never shown on the hero’s page or the map.
• Honorees: if a nominator provides the hero’s email address, we use it once — to tell them they’ve been honored — and only when the nominator asked us to. It is never published.
• Guestbook authors: your name and email when you leave kind words on a hero’s page. The email is used for moderation follow-up and is never shown publicly.
• Reports: details you submit when reporting a listing, used solely to review the report.
• Editorial heroes: for heroes added by our own team, we record the public news source that recognized them, so every editorial listing is traceable to published reporting.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers — we see only the payment’s status, amount, and the email address used at checkout.

We measure traffic with Plausible, a privacy-first analytics tool: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no personal profiles — just aggregate counts of pages and events.

Email from us is about your own activity: receipts, review outcomes for your nomination, notice when your kind words are published, and payment recovery if a checkout was interrupted. We don’t sell or rent your email address, and we don’t share it with anyone except the services that deliver our email. Any future non-transactional email will be opt-in with a working unsubscribe.

Nominations that are never paid for are deleted, along with their photos, after about a week. Published hero pages and guestbook messages stay up — that’s the point of the map — until the nominator, the honoree, or their family asks us to change or remove them.

Want something corrected, unpublished, or deleted — including your email address from our records? Email hello@mapofheroes.org or use the contact page. Requests from an honoree or their family get priority.