Privacy
Revised 27 October 2026. This notice covers GovBot Earthquakes & Landslides at earthquakes-api.govbot.ai, operated by Ideation Lab, Corp. The ChatGPT directory plugin has not been published.
Summary
- No accounts, sign-in or credentials.
- No device location lookup and no address lookup.
- No application store of your search history.
- Research parameters you provide are sent to fixed public USGS and Census endpoints and to USGS landslide inventory services hosted on ArcGIS Online, as described below.
- Short-lived in-memory caches; no persistent application data store.
- No advertising, no sale of data, and no purchases in the app.
What the app does not ask for
The app has no accounts and does not ask for passwords, API keys or other credentials. It does not request your device location and has no geocoder, so it cannot turn an address into coordinates. Please do not share your home address or precise personal location; a state, or a public reference point such as a city center, is enough.
What is sent to source publishers
To answer a request, the app sends the research parameters needed for that query to fixed public endpoints:
| Parameters | Destination |
|---|---|
| Research coordinates and radius, UTC dates, minimum magnitude, significance index, ordering, event IDs | USGS Earthquake Catalog (FDSN Event Web Service) and USGS event product files, including ShakeMap and Did You Feel It? |
| Research coordinates, radius and confidence class | USGS landslide inventory feature services, hosted on ArcGIS Online (services.arcgis.com). Requested research coordinates are sent to this host. — Landslide Inventories across the United States, version 3.0 |
| U.S. state | U.S. Census Bureau TIGERweb boundary services |
These publishers apply their own privacy and logging policies to requests they receive.
Caching
To keep the app fast, the server may reuse a recent response instead of fetching it again: ordinary responses can be reused for up to 10 minutes, and layer, state, and ShakeMap metadata for up to 24 hours. These are reuse lifetimes, not deletion deadlines. An entry's age is checked only when that entry is next requested, so an expired entry that is never requested again may stay in the server's process memory until it is pushed out of the size-limited cache or the server process restarts. The cache holds at most 64 entries and 32 MiB of serialized data. The app does not write this data to any persistent app data store. These cache limits describe the app itself; hosting-provider operational logging is separate and described below.
Cache entries may include the request parameters used to look up a response.
Hosting and operational logs
The service runs on Google Cloud Run. The configured default operational-log sink routes to the project’s _Default log bucket, whose retention was verified as 30 days on 27 October 2026. Operational request logs may contain request times, network addresses, request paths, user-agent and status metadata. The application does not write tool request bodies to logs. This statement describes the inspected default operational-log configuration, not every provider, security or administrative audit record; those can follow separate policies. Source publishers and OpenAI apply their own logging and retention practices.
This notice covers earthquakes-api.govbot.ai. The govbot.ai website has its own privacy policy; the service retention periods above do not describe website logging.
ChatGPT and OpenAI
When the app is used in ChatGPT, your conversation is handled by OpenAI under OpenAI’s own terms and privacy policy. The app receives the tool inputs ChatGPT sends for a request. GovBot is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI.
Support email
If you write to hello@govbot.ai, your message will include your email address and anything you choose to write, which may include contact details. It is used to respond to you. Support emails are retained until manually deleted; there is no fixed deletion schedule.
Advertising and commerce
There is no advertising, no sale or sharing of personal information for advertising, and no purchases or other commerce in the app.
External sites
Briefs link to USGS, Census and inventory publisher pages. Those sites are operated by their publishers and apply their own policies.
Changes and contact
This notice may change as the service changes. Its revision date appears above. Questions or privacy requests: hello@govbot.ai.