Privacy
PDX Train collects nothing about you. There is no account to make, nothing to log in to, and nothing about you to sell or lose.
What the app and the site do not collect
- No location. The app never asks for your location and could not use it - it watches one fixed crossing.
- No accounts, no email, no names. There is nothing to sign up for.
- No analytics or advertising. No trackers, no third-party scripts, no advertising identifiers, no cookies set by this site.
- No contacts, photos, microphone, or camera. The app requests no such permissions.
What is watched is a street, not a person
Every picture on this site comes from public traffic cameras operated by ODOT and PBOT, aimed at a road and a railroad crossing and published by them for anyone to view. The cameras face the roadway. PDX Train reads those pictures to answer one question - is a train across the tracks - and keeps them so the answer can be checked and improved later.
What does happen when you use it
Asking for the crossing's status makes an ordinary web request, the same as visiting any website: a server receives it, and Cloudflare sits in front to serve pages quickly. Standard server and network logs exist for a short time as a side effect of running a service on the internet. They are not analysed, not linked to anyone, and not shared.
If you ask Siri, Apple handles the voice part under Apple's privacy policy; the app only receives the request and answers it.
Children
PDX Train is a picture of a railroad crossing. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.
Changes and contact
If this ever stops being true, this page changes first. Questions: the project is on GitHub.
Last updated 31 August 2026.