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Sources, methodology & legal

Last updated: August 2026.

What countrysignal is

countrysignal is an information service. It aggregates public data to help you stay aware of dangers around the world. It is not an emergency service, not an official alerting authority, and never a substitute for instructions from your government or local authorities. When authorities give instructions, follow them first. Always check your government's official travel advice before traveling.

Data sources

  • Natural hazard events: GDACS for global multi-hazard events, the USGS earthquake catalog, US National Weather Service alerts, and NASA FIRMS satellite fire detections. CountrySignal normalizes these feeds and removes events after their published end.
  • Conflict & instability estimates: probabilities derived from public prediction markets (including Polymarket) and from aggregate worldwide news-event data (the GDELT Project). These inputs are fused by our own scoring engine; what you see on the site are our derived estimates, not raw quotes from any single source.
  • Official travel baseline: structured country advice from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. It is shown separately from our live change signal and links back to the official country page.
  • Maps: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Geocoding by Nominatim.

Methodology, in short

Conflict estimates combine (a) dated probabilities implied by public prediction markets, weighted by how liquid and recent they are, and (b) anomaly detection over worldwide news-event volume against a rolling per-country baseline. Either support channel can raise an informational caution/watch, but neither can produce an "avoid" verdict alone. A live conflict "avoid" requires independent evidence that the danger is territorial; the separate official baseline can also set an avoid floor. Confidence is shown separately from the estimate itself. Natural-hazard alerts come from authoritative feeds and keep their published footprint and end time.

No advice, no guarantee

Estimates are probabilistic and can be wrong, late, or incomplete. They are provided "as is", for information only, and do not constitute travel, safety, financial or legal advice. To the maximum extent permitted by law, countrysignal disclaims all liability arising from reliance on the service. See also the in-app notices.

Affiliate links

Some outbound links on countrysignal's travel-resources and country pages (travel insurance, eSIM marketplaces, accommodation) may be affiliate links: if you buy through them, countrysignal earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate status never changes which options are shown or how any country's safety verdict is computed, and pages with such links carry a disclosure next to them. countrysignal is not an insurance broker and does not sell any third-party product itself.

Privacy

Your browser rounds a GPS fix to roughly 1 km before sending it to countrysignal's API or to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service for the nearby place label. countrysignal stores only that approximate position and uses it to match the device against danger areas. OpenStreetMap map tiles and Nominatim are third-party services and receive normal web-request metadata such as an IP address. Family-circle members see each other's first name and safety check-ins, never positions.

First-party product measurement stores a hash of a random browser identifier, at most once per event per day. It stores no IP address, user-agent fingerprint, location or third-party advertising identifier, and the rows are deleted after 90 days.

CountrySignal Ops is a separate business workspace. It stores the customer company's email, internal booking and traveler references, destination and trip dates so the requested trips can be monitored. Public traveler briefs contain none of those references or dates. Pilot customers should use internal references rather than traveler names in CSV files.