About this map
Raymap is a crowdsourced map of what volunteer devices observe on the cellular network: whether a phone spotted signals consistent with an IMSI catcher (a "stingray"), or nothing unusual. It is drawn as an H3 hexagon mesh over the United States.
It is a record of what was reported, not a measurement of a place. Absence of reports is not absence of surveillance.
Reading the map
| Cell | Meaning |
|---|---|
| solid red | Detection reported by 2 or more devices — corroborated |
| hollow red | Detection from 1 device — unconfirmed |
| solid green | No detection reported, from 2 or more devices |
| hollow green | No detection reported, from 1 device |
| grey | Nobody reported from here |
What this project does not keep
- No coordinates. Each report is snapped to an H3 cell on arrival and the latitude and longitude are discarded. Nothing finer than H3 r7 (~5 km²) is stored.
- No cell finer than 7.4 km is shown. The map never renders a hexagon smaller than r6 (~36 km²) at any zoom, enforced by the API as well as the UI.
- No report timestamps. Responses carry a day or a month, never the moment something was seen.
- No stable device identity. Each install generates a random id; only a hash of it is uploaded, and it is not derived from hardware.
- No IP logs. The web server at the edge records no access log, and the application logs no request addresses.
Raw reports are deleted after 72 hours; the aggregated daily cells after 90 days; the monthly detection archive is kept indefinitely because it is already only counts per cell.
Data and licence
Aggregate data is published under CC BY 4.0 — attribution: "Raymap aggregate data © contributors, CC BY 4.0 — https://raymap.org". Every API response carries that line, and monthly detection snapshots are published for reuse.
The code is Apache-2.0. Rayhunter is a separate GPL-3.0 program; no Rayhunter code is included here.
Taking part
Reports come from a hotspot running Rayhunter plus the raymap collector. It reads the device over USB every 15 minutes and uploads a status record. Nothing about the device's own identity is sent.
To report a vulnerability — especially anything that leaks a coordinate, a precise time, or a device identity — use the private reporting link on the repository's security page, or email security@raymap.org.
Known limits
- Only the United States is covered, and only where someone has run a collector.
- A single device's report is unconfirmed: one phone can be wrong, or spoofed. Uploads are proof-of-work gated, which raises the cost of flooding but does not make a report true.
- Detection logic is Rayhunter's, not this project's.
- Cells are coarse by design. Two detections 7 km apart look like one cell.
Source, methodology and operations notes: github.com/ffenyeroc/raymapper