Plain-language privacy

Your financial entries stay with you

The calculator runs in browser memory. Housing Time Machine does not save your entries, put them in a URL, or attach them to analytics.

The calculator

Processed locally, not stored by the application

Annual household income and the selected comparison year are processed in memory in your current browser tab. The application does not store those entries, add them to the page URL, or include them in analytics events.

Personalized results are calculated locally from the public, immutable data snapshot. Closing the tab or clearing the form removes the entries from the application's working memory. Housing Time Machine does not create an account or persistent result record.

Result images

Nothing is generated or sent without your action

A personalized result image is created only after you choose to generate it. The image is rendered in your browser from an allowlist containing the selected year, public median price, rounded gross-income-years result, active snapshot label, and the randomly selected public top-20 wealth record and rounded home equivalent. It excludes your entered income, query strings, and persistent identifiers.

The application does not upload the image. It leaves your browser only if you explicitly download it or open your device's share sheet. Copying the result summary copies the selected year, rounded derived ratio, and public site address—not the income you entered. The random wealth selection is generated locally and is not sent as an analytics property.

The selected year, median price, CPI method, and rounded ratio can allow a recipient to infer an approximate income range. Generate or share a result only if you are comfortable disclosing that derived information.

Aggregate measurement

Vercel Web Analytics is enabled

Housing Time Machine uses Vercel Web Analytics to understand aggregate site use. Vercel describes this product as cookie-free and designed around anonymized, aggregate measurements. Pageview data can include the visited path, referrer, broad location, device, operating system, and browser information.

The site also records a small allowlist of property-free interaction names: calculator completed, result card generated, share started, image downloaded, and full timeline opened. These events contain no income, selected year, result ratio, wealth value, share text, or personalized URL state.

Read Vercel's official Web Analytics privacy documentation and custom event documentation.

Advertising status

AdSense ownership is declared; ads are not served

Housing Time Machine currently publishes the public AdSense account identifier ca-pub-9826228992119722 in a verification meta tag and identifies the same publisher relationship in ads.txt. These text declarations let Google verify site ownership; they do not load advertising, set advertising cookies, or create ad personalization by themselves.

No AdSense JavaScript, ad unit, or ad-serving request is currently installed. Before advertising is enabled, the site must complete a separate reviewed release covering placement quality, required consent controls, regional requirements, and an updated privacy inventory. The site will not place ads on error, navigation-only, unfinished, or low-value screens.

Email contact

Email is optional and separate from the calculator

The contact page opens a normal email link. If you choose to send a message, it leaves this site and is handled by your email provider and the publisher's email provider. Do not send income, mortgage account details, government identifiers, or other sensitive financial information. Contact messages are never joined to calculator entries because the application does not receive or retain those entries.

Product boundary

Educational comparison, not financial advice

Housing Time Machine is an educational historical comparison. Gross-income years are not a savings, purchase, or payoff timeline, mortgage qualification, underwriting, a lending decision, or individualized financial advice. The estimate excludes many costs and personal factors described in the methodology.