How the Privacy-First "Near Me" Works
Tap Near me on the tracker and it sorts earthquakes by how far they are from you, with your position marked on the map. It does this without your location ever leaving your device. Here's how.
Your location stays in your browser
The button uses the browser's built-in Geolocation API. When you tap it, your browser — not LK Forge — asks for permission and, if you agree, hands the page a pair of coordinates. We keep those coordinates in memory only for the current page, use them to do some maths, and never send them anywhere. There's no LK Forge server involved, no logging, and nothing is stored after you close the tab. We don't even save your location between visits.
The haversine formula
To turn "your coordinates" and "the earthquake's coordinates" into a distance, the tracker uses the haversine formula — the standard way to measure the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere. In plain terms, it accounts for the curve of the Earth so the distance is accurate whether a quake is 20 km or 12,000 km away. The page runs it for every earthquake in the feed, then sorts the list nearest-first and shows each distance in both kilometres and miles.
A map with no tracking either
The world map is a single inline SVG drawn from public-domain coastline data that ships with the page. Each epicentre is plotted by converting its longitude and latitude into x/y coordinates on that map — a simple equirectangular projection. Because the map is first-party, it loads no tiles from a third-party map service, so opening the tracker doesn't quietly tell any map provider where you're looking. Your "you are here" dot is drawn the same way, entirely in the browser.
Why we built it this way
Location is sensitive, and a "show me earthquakes near me" tool is exactly the kind of thing that could leak it. By doing every step — permission, distance maths and map drawing — on your device, the feature stays useful without asking you to trust us with where you are. It's the same privacy-first approach behind using the public USGS feed directly.
Try it — tap "Near me" and see the closest quakes to you.
Open the Earthquake Tracker