Privacy Policy

The short version

Visa Bulletin Tracker is a static reference site — Visa Bulletin data pages and a priority-date tool that runs in your browser. It collects nothing about you. There are no accounts, no sign-ups, no newsletter and nothing to log in to, so there is nothing for the site to know.

As it stands today, this site shows no ads, loads no external resources at all, and sets no cookies. That is not a promise about the future — it is a description of what is being served to you right now, and the rest of this page spells out each part of it. Ads may be added later; that is covered under Advertising.

The thing most worth knowing: your priority date never leaves your browser. That is the one genuinely sensitive thing you might type here, and the tool is built so it cannot be collected — see 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 of any kind — neither ours nor anyone else's, because no advertising or tracking code is loaded at all.

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 150 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

This site sets no cookies. Not its own, and not anybody else's. There is no cookie banner on this site for the simplest possible reason: there are no cookies to consent to. Nothing is written to local storage or session storage either, and nothing about you is remembered between page loads or between visits.

You can browse the entire site with cookies blocked and lose nothing at all, because no feature here depends on them.

Third-party content

This site loads zero external resources. Every byte your browser fetches to render these pages comes from this site: the stylesheet, the fonts, the tiny amount of JavaScript that runs the tool, the favicon. There are no third-party fonts, no CDN scripts, no analytics beacons, no ad tags, no embedded videos, no maps, no social widgets, no tracking pixels — nothing. No other company learns that you visited this site, because your browser never contacts one.

This is not incidental and it is not a side effect of the site being small. It is an enforced build rule: the build scans every file it produces for an off-site request and fails if it finds one, so a third-party resource cannot be added by accident. It is checked on every single build, which is what makes the claim above something other than an assurance.

Pages do link out — chiefly to the U.S. Department of State and the Internet Archive, the sources this site is built on. Those are ordinary links: nothing is fetched from them unless you choose to click, and once you do, you are on their site under their privacy practices, not ours.

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

This site currently shows no advertising. No ad network is loaded, no ad slots are rendered, no ad script runs, and no advertising cookie is set. There is nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing running.

That may change, and you should know it now rather than notice it later. This site is free, has no subscription and sells nothing, and display advertising is the intended way to cover its hosting and data costs. If ads are added, the most likely partner is Google AdSense, and the practical differences would be: your browser would load Google's ad script from Google's servers (so the "zero external resources" statement above would no longer be true), and Google and its partners could set cookies or device identifiers to serve, cap and measure those ads under their own privacy policies.

This page cannot fall behind that change. The text you are reading is generated from the site's own advertising configuration on every build: the moment advertising is switched on, this section is replaced — in the same build, automatically — with the full disclosure and the opt-out links, and the "last updated" date at the top is revised. The build also checks that this page's claims match the configuration and fails if they do not, so this site cannot serve you an ad while telling you it does not.

Two things would not change, whatever happens. Advertising will never alter a published cut-off date, a movement, a history or an estimate on this site — the figures are the State Department's and are not for sale. And no category, country or figure here will ever be sponsored or pay-to-play.

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

There is nothing here to opt out of, which is the intended state. You can browse the whole site with cookies blocked, with a tracker blocker running, and in a private window, and nothing will break and nothing will be missing — there is nothing for a blocker to block. With JavaScript disabled every page still reads and every published figure is still there; only the interactive tool stops working.

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 [email protected]. There is unlikely to be any data to ask about, which is the point.