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Sources, methodology & legal

Last updated: July 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 (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, a cooperation framework of the United Nations and the European Commission).
  • 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. The two channels corroborate each other; neither alone can raise more than an informational "watch" level. Confidence is shown separately from the estimate itself. Natural-hazard alerts come from official feeds and are shown as published.

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 precise location never leaves your device in full precision: positions are coarsened (~1 km) before storage and are used only to match you against danger areas. 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.