Privacy
Short version: there's almost nothing to collect.
No accounts, no logins, and no cookies at all — not ours, not anyone's. Traffic is counted, but by a cookieless tool that never learns who you are; there's a section on it below. Two things do get kept on your device, both first-party and neither identifying: an offline cache, where a service worker saves pages you've already opened so the guide still works with no signal, and a single session flag recording that you've seen the listings animate in once, so they don't do it again on every page. The session flag disappears when you close the tab. Nothing is written to local storage. Filtering, like your happy-hour time, is worked out on your device too, and never leaves it.
No ads, no affiliate links, no sponsored listings, no social embeds, and nothing that follows you from this site to another. The typeface is served from this site rather than from Google.
Why there's no cookie banner
Because there are no cookies to consent to. Consent rules turn on storing or reading things on your device, and nothing here does either — the analytics included, which is exactly why measuring traffic costs you no banner.
Loaded in a clean browser and audited on : zero cookies, zero local storage, zero IndexedDB. The typeface is served from this site rather than from Google, and there are no embeds and no tag manager. One third-party script now loads on every page — the Cloudflare analytics beacon described below. It is the only one.
The other third party is the map, and only if you switch to Map view. It set no cookies when checked. If that ever changes, or if anything is added that does set one, this page gets rewritten before it ships.
Who else sees anything
Four companies, and only in these situations:
- GitHub Pages hosts the site, so every page load reaches its servers. Like any web host, it logs the IP address and browser user agent that made the request.
- Cloudflare counts traffic. Its beacon loads on every page and reports which page you opened, the site that sent you here, and your device type, browser, operating system and country. It sets no cookie, writes nothing to your device, and does not fingerprint your IP address or browser to recognize you. It cannot tell one visitor from another across sites, and nobody here can work out who you are from it. What it is for is knowing whether anyone uses the guide, and which neighborhoods are worth checking more often.
- OpenFreeMap draws the map, and only if you switch to Map view. List is the default; while you stay in it, OpenFreeMap is never contacted. Open the map and it receives your IP address and which tiles your screen needs.
- Formspree carries the Suggest and Report forms, and sees a submission only when you actually send one. It gets what you typed, plus the bar name — and on a report, which listing you were looking at. Neither form asks for a name or an email.
- Formspree also carries the unsubscribe form, which is the one place on this site that does ask for an email address — it has to, because taking an address off the venue outreach list is the whole purpose. It is used for that and nothing else: not stored on this site, never published, never used to write to you.
Links out to venue websites, Instagram and Google Maps directions are plain links. Following one hands you to that company under its rules, not this site's.
Questions
Email hello@4pmdetroit.com — corrections, complaints and requests to be left out of the guide all land in the same place. Ryan Kolean, Detroit, MI.