Privacy Policy

The short version

Visa Bulletin Tracker is a static reference site — Visa Bulletin data pages and a browser-side priority-date tool. It needs as little of your data as is technically possible: no accounts, no sign-ups, and no personal data collected by the site itself. To keep it free, it shows ads through Google AdSense — the one third party involved; the Advertising section explains what that means and how to opt out.

The priority-date tool still runs entirely in your browser. What you enter is never sent to a server. See the tool below.

What this site does not collect

Because there is nothing to log into, nothing to buy and nothing to subscribe to, the site never asks for and never stores:

• Names, email addresses, phone numbers, or postal addresses.
• Account credentials — there are no accounts.
• Payment or billing information — nothing is sold here.
• The priority date, visa category, or country of chargeability you enter into the tool. These are the whole point of the site and none of them is collected. See below.
• Any information about your immigration case, status, petition, or receipt numbers — none of it is asked for, and none of it is needed to use the site.
• Precise location, contacts, photos, or any device data beyond what your browser sends with an ordinary web request.
• Advertising or tracking identifiers created by us — the site sets none of its own. Ads are served by Google AdSense, which may set its own advertising cookies; see Advertising.

What the priority-date tool does with what you type

A priority date is a real fact about a real person's immigration case, and it is the one thing on this site worth being careful with. So the tool is built so that it cannot be collected, rather than being collected and promised away.

There is no server here to send it to. This site is a set of static files. The cut-off data for the current bulletin — all 75 published combinations of it — is embedded in the page itself, and the comparison against the date you enter is performed by code running on your own machine. Your priority date is not transmitted, not stored, not logged, and not associated with you. Close the tab and it is gone; there is no copy anywhere.

This holds whether JavaScript is on or off, and that took a deliberate design choice. The tool is not a web form — there is no form anywhere on this site. A form is a thing that submits, and a submitted form puts its contents in the address bar, which is the one place a priority date must never end up: addresses are written to ordinary server logs by default. So the fields here are just fields, grouped and labelled, with nothing behind them to send. There is no submit button because there is nothing to submit to. With JavaScript turned off the tool simply does not run, and the page shows a worked example instead — pressing Enter does nothing, because there is nothing there to press Enter on.

That is checked, not assumed: the build inspects every page it produces and fails if any of them ever ships a form that could submit. The guarantee is structural, not a promise about how carefully the code was written.

Cookies and browser storage

Visa Bulletin Tracker sets no cookies of its own and uses no browser storage to profile you. The one exception is advertising: the third-party Google AdSense code described under Advertising may set or read cookies and device identifiers in your browser. Those are set by Google, not by this site.

Third-party content

Advertising is the only third party involved in serving these pages — see Advertising. Everything else the page loads is served from this site.

Analytics

There is currently no analytics on this site of any kind. No page-view counter, no cookieless analytics, no tag manager, no heatmaps, no session recording. Nobody is counting you.

If aggregate analytics is ever added, it will be held to the standard the rest of this page describes: no cookies, no personal data, no cross-site tracking, no per-visitor profile — and this page will say so before it goes live, because the build will not let it say otherwise.

Advertising

Visa Bulletin Tracker shows third-party ads through Google AdSense to help cover hosting and data costs. When ads are served, Google and its advertising partners may set and read cookies or use device identifiers to serve, cap and measure ads — and, where permitted, to show ads relevant to your interests. That activity is controlled by the ad networks under their own privacy policies, not by this site.

Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites. You can learn how Google uses information from sites that use its services, and control the data used to personalize ads, at these Google resources:

• How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
• Google advertising and cookies: policies.google.com/technologies/ads
• Manage or opt out of personalized Google ads (My Ad Center): myadcenter.google.com
• Opt out of personalized advertising from many vendors at once: optout.aboutads.info (Digital Advertising Alliance) and youradchoices.com

Advertising never alters a published cut-off date, a movement, a history or an estimate on this site, and no category, country or figure here is sponsored or pay-to-play. If additional ad partners are ever added, this policy and the "last updated" date at the top will be revised.

Server logs and security

Like virtually every website, the hosting infrastructure may briefly process standard request metadata — your IP address, user-agent string, and the address of the page requested — for the ordinary purposes of delivering the page and protecting the site from abuse. Any such logs are short-lived, are handled by the hosting provider, and are not used to build a profile of you. This is the only data that touches a server at all, and none of it is anything this site asked you for.

Data retention

There is nothing to retain. No personal data is collected, so none is kept — there is no database of users, no record of searches, and no history of what anyone looked up. Transient server logs are retained only as long as the hosting provider needs them for security and operations, then discarded.

Children's privacy

This is a general-audience reference site that knowingly collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Your choices

You can browse the entire site with cookies disabled — none of its own features depend on them. The opt-out links under Advertising turn off personalized Google ads at the network level.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes — most likely because advertising is added, as described under Advertising — the "last updated" date at the top of this page will be revised. Because this page is generated from the site's own configuration, a change to what the site actually does rewrites the affected section in the same build that makes the change, rather than waiting for someone to remember.

Contact

Visa Bulletin Tracker is an independent data project. Questions about privacy, or about any data you believe is held, can be sent to contact@visabulletinlookup.com. There is unlikely to be any data to ask about, which is the point.