Last updated: September 1, 2026
Pastmaps is a historical map service. We georeference scanned maps from national archives and public map libraries, overlay them on an interactive modern map, and let you search any place, compare the past with the present, download maps at full resolution, and order printed reproductions. This policy covers the pastmaps.com website and related services, operated by Pastmaps LLC, a Delaware limited liability company in Seattle, Washington.
Account information. Your email address and, depending on how you sign in, your name and profile picture. If you sign in with Google, this comes from Google (see below). If you sign in with an emailed one-time code, we collect only your email address.
Purchases. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never receive your full card number. We store your subscription status, purchase history, and — for printed maps — the shipping name and address you enter at checkout.
Usage. The pages and maps you view, the searches you run, the features you use, and your IP address, browser, device, and the approximate location (city or region) derived from it. If you allow your browser to share your location, we also store your exact coordinates in a cookie on your device for 24 hours and read them back to show you maps near you. Our analytics provider also records a playback of your session — clicks, scrolling, navigation — to help us find bugs; text you type into form fields is masked and is not captured.
Preferences. If you answer the optional onboarding questions, we store your answers so that we can tailor what the service shows you.
Cookies. We and our providers use cookies and local storage to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, measure usage, and support advertising. See our Cookie Policy.
Google Sign-In and Google One Tap use only Google’s basic sign-in scopes: openid, userinfo.email, and userinfo.profile. We do not request access to Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar, Photos, or any other Google service, and we cannot read or change anything in your Google Account.
From those scopes we receive your email address, your name, your profile picture URL, and your Google account identifier, and we store those along with the profile response Google returns. We use them to create and authenticate your Pastmaps account, to show your name and picture in the interface, and to email you about your account and orders. We do not sell this information. The email address and name we receive from Google are also shared with Meta to measure our advertising, which is described in full under How We Share Information below.
You can disconnect Pastmaps from your Google Account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Some older accounts were created with Facebook sign-in, which worked the same way and stored the same kinds of profile details.
To run the service — creating and securing your account, showing you maps, saving your preferences, and delivering downloads. To take and fulfill orders, and to send receipts and order updates. To send you marketing email, which you can unsubscribe from. To improve the service — understanding which features are used, diagnosing errors, and testing new designs. To measure our advertising. To prevent abuse and fraud, and to meet our tax and legal obligations.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.
We share personal information with the service providers who run parts of Pastmaps for us, and only so that they can do that work: our hosting, content delivery, and security provider; Stripe, which processes payments; the printing partners who produce and ship printed maps, which receive the shipping name, address, and email address for your order; the providers that send email about your account and orders and manage our email lists; and our product analytics provider, which receives your email address and IP address alongside your activity and is also what records the session playback described above.
We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used. We also share your email address and name with Meta, to measure our advertising and to show Pastmaps ads to people who have visited the site. Our servers send them hashed; while you are signed in, Meta’s script in the page also receives them directly and hashes them in your browser. If you signed in with Google, the email address and name involved are the ones Google gave us. When you buy something we additionally send the city, state, postal code, country, and any phone number on your order, together with what you bought, what you paid, and the identifier of your subscription. Every one of these carries your IP address and browser user agent.
Under California law this may count as “sharing” personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. Your browser’s cookie controls and Meta’s ad preferences limit what Meta’s script can collect in your browser, but they do not stop what our servers send. Deleting your account stops those; if you would rather keep your account, email us and we will see what we can do for you.
If you use our experimental map assistant, the question you type, the recent conversation, and an image of the map you are looking at together with its coordinates are sent to Google’s Gemini API to generate a reply. If you have allowed your browser to share your location, those coordinates may be where you are. No account details are attached to that request.
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or in connection with a sale of the business.
Delete your account. Email hello@pastmaps.com from the address on your account and we will erase your account, activity history, and email profiles, normally within 30 days. You can use the same address to ask for a copy of your data or to have it corrected. Records we are required to keep, such as invoices, are retained for as long as tax law requires.
Unsubscribe from marketing email using the link in any of it. This does not stop receipts and order updates.
Disconnect Pastmaps from your Google Account in your Google account settings.
We use HTTPS across the whole service, encrypted storage, and access controls that limit who on our side can reach personal data, and card details stay with Stripe rather than on our systems. There is no password to steal: you sign in with a provider or with a one-time code emailed to you. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
We may update this policy from time to time. We will change the date at the top, and if the changes are material we will notify you by email or by posting a notice on the site.
Questions about this policy or how we handle your information? Contact Pastmaps LLC, Seattle, Washington, at hello@pastmaps.com.