This page describes system behaviour, not legal terms. Closient’s own privacy
policy and terms are published separately at
closient.com and govern our side of the
relationship.
Requests the widget makes
Everything the widget loads or calls, in the order a visitor triggers it.
Closient is the only party that receives visitor data, with one exception:
map tiles — and that exception is one you can switch off, with
data-map="off".
Tile images are fetched by the visitor’s browser directly from
OpenStreetMap, so while the map is on, the
OpenStreetMap Foundation sees the visitor’s IP address and which map area they
are looking at. Under their
tile usage policy they
also publish anonymised, aggregated usage data that includes which websites use
the service. No other third party is contacted — the map library is bundled
into the widget script, and both location lookups run on Closient’s servers
rather than in the visitor’s browser.
Why Closient does not proxy tiles for you. We proxy the geocoder, so the
obvious question is why not the map as well. The OpenStreetMap tile usage
policy forbids it: §3.4 rules out “tunnel[ling] all clients behind a single,
anonymous identity”, which is precisely the property that would make a proxy
private, and §5 says the Foundation “generally do[es] not recommend” a caching
proxy in front of their tiles. A proxy that satisfied the policy would still
disclose your visitors; one that protected them would breach it. The honest
options are therefore a tile source you hold your own agreement with, or no
map — both below.
How location is determined
The widget tries three sources, in order, and stops at the first that works.1
Browser geolocation
The browser’s own location prompt. Precise, and shown to the visitor as an
explicit permission request by their browser. Closient receives the
resulting coordinates but never the underlying device signals.
2
Network-level approximation
If the visitor denies or ignores the prompt, the widget asks Closient for
the approximate location our edge network already derives from the
connection. This is city-level at best and often less. It happens
server-side: no third-party geolocation service is involved, and the
visitor’s IP address is not stored or returned.
3
Address search
If neither is available, the visitor types a place. The text is sent to
Closient, which resolves it to coordinates server-side and caches the
result. The visitor’s browser never contacts the geocoding provider, so
the provider sees Closient’s servers rather than your visitors.
Cookies and storage
The widget sets no cookies and writes nothing tolocalStorage,
sessionStorage, or IndexedDB. It holds state in memory for the life of
the page only. Analytics events are attributed to your publishable key, not
to a visitor identifier — there is no cross-site or cross-session tracking,
and consequently nothing for a cookie banner to gate.
Coordinates from the browser’s location prompt are used for the search that
requested them and are not persisted.
What Closient retains
Reducing third-party exposure to zero
If your privacy posture rules out any third-party request, the map is the only thing standing in the way — anddata-map="off" removes it:
Keeping a map, on your own terms
If you already hold an agreement with a tile provider — MapTiler, Stadia Maps, your own tile server — point the widget at it withdata-tile-url and give the
provider’s required attribution in data-tile-attribution:
data-tile-attribution is required whenever data-tile-url is set: rather than
guess an attribution or quietly fall back to OpenStreetMap — the host you were
configuring your way off — the widget switches the map off and logs the reason
to the browser console. Both attributes are script-embed only; the iframe embed
accepts map=off but not a custom tile URL.
Configuration reference
The embed accepts these attributes. Onlydata-map and data-tile-url change
what data is processed, and both only by removing or redirecting the map tile
request.