Privacy notice
Read this before you submit a report. A missing-person listing is published on the open internet. Anyone can see it, and copies can outlive the listing itself. We ask you to share this information because it helps people be found — but the trade-off is real and you should make it knowingly.
What is published publicly
Everything in this list appears on a public page that anyone can open, without signing in:
- The missing person's first, middle and last name
- Their age, gender and country of origin
- The last known location and district you describe, and the date last seen
- Your written description of them — clothing, build, distinguishing features
- Any photographs you upload
- The listing's reference code, the date it was reported, and its current status
What is never published
Your contact details are held privately and shown only to the volunteers who run this register:
- Your name and your relationship to the missing person
- Your phone number, email address, and any Facebook, Instagram or TikTok links
- Any other contact route you give us
We keep these private deliberately. Publishing a grieving family's phone number next to a photograph is precisely the signal that fraudsters look for after a disaster. When someone has information about your listing, a volunteer passes it to you.
What we collect that you do not see
- A one-way HMAC-SHA256 hash of the IP address that submitted the report, used to rate-limit abuse. We do not store the address itself and cannot recover it from the hash.
- Timestamps for submission and for any later change to the listing.
- A record that you ticked the consent box, and which version of this notice was in force.
- An internal log of actions taken by volunteers on the listing.
There is no advertising on this site, no analytics, and no third-party trackers.
Photographs
Photographs are uploaded straight from your device to a private storage bucket. The bucket cannot be browsed or listed by the public. Images are shown on listing pages through links that expire after one hour. Only JPG and PNG files are accepted.
Please upload only photographs you have the right to share. Avoid images that show other identifiable people, home addresses, documents, or identifying details you would not want made public.
Once something is public, it can be copied
This is the most important paragraph on this page. Public listings can be indexed by search engines, saved by web archives, screenshotted, and re-posted to social media by people we have no relationship with. If you ask us to remove a listing we will remove it from this site, and we will delete the photographs from storage — but we cannot retrieve copies that other people have already made. Please consider that before uploading a photograph or writing a description.
How long we keep things
- Listings stay up while the search is active, and remain afterwards marked “found safe” unless the family asks for removal.
- A removed listing is retained for a short period so it can be restored if it was taken down in error, then permanently erased along with its photographs.
- Photographs uploaded but never attached to a report are deleted automatically within 24 hours.
- Volunteer action logs are kept so that decisions about listings remain accountable.
Your choices
You can ask us to remove a listing, correct it, update its status, or delete a photograph. Quote the listing's reference code (it looks like NDS-AB12CD).
- Use the “Report this listing” link at the bottom of any listing page, or
- Email [email protected].
If the missing person is found and is an adult who wants their listing gone, we will remove it on their request. If you are named in a listing and did not consent to it, tell us and we will take it down while we look into it.
Reports about children
Reports about people under 18 are accepted because finding them matters, but please give only what is needed to recognise them. If you are not a parent, guardian or close relative, we ask that you have their agreement before reporting. A parent or guardian can have a listing about their child removed at any time.
People reported from outside Nepal
Some people listed here were visiting from other countries, and their families may be covered by data-protection laws such as the UK or EU GDPR. Where those laws apply, we process this information to protect someone's vital interests and on the basis of the consent given at submission. You may ask for access to, correction of, or erasure of information relating to you, using the routes above.
Where information is stored
This site is operated by the Nepal Disaster Search volunteers. Listings and photographs are held with our hosting and storage provider (Amazon Web Services). Information may therefore be stored or processed outside Nepal.
Changes to this notice
If we change this notice materially we will publish a new version number here. The version in force when you submitted a report is recorded against it.