What LiveTerra notifies you about
What counts as significant, why most days are quiet, and why places close together share a square.
A notification from LiveTerra means an agency has reported something significant near a place you watch. This guide explains each of those words.
Significant
Each source grades what it publishes. GDACS, which supplies wildfires, storms, floods and volcanoes, marks events by how much impact it expects; earthquakes carry a magnitude. LiveTerra takes those grades rather than inventing its own, and only significant events are ever sent. The World tab shows the same set by default, and switching it to everything adds the small earthquakes that nobody would want a notification for.
For earthquakes you set the bar yourself, per place. The default is M6 and up, which is the level at which people far from the epicentre notice. Set it lower for somewhere you want to hear about every tremor.
Most days, nothing happens
That is the honest shape of this data. Some places see something most weeks. Many see nothing for months. LiveTerra will not invent activity to look busy, and a quiet list is a real answer. If you have not heard from it, that is what silence means.
Near a place
Your phone tells our server which parts of the world to watch as a set of coarse grid squares, about 100 km across, covering each place and its radius. It never sends a place name or an exact position. When something significant is reported inside one of those squares, your phone is told.
The squares are what keep your places off our server, and they have one consequence worth knowing. Two places closer together than about 100 km share a square, so a hazard you switched off for one can still arrive because of the other. If you watch Antwerp for floods and Brussels for everything, a flood near Brussels reaches you either way.
The set of squares is still specific to you, so this is private rather than anonymous, and the privacy policy says so plainly.
What a notification opens
Tap it and the app opens on the event, with its card. If the agency has since withdrawn or merged the event, which GDACS does with wildfires, the app still takes you to where it was and says so rather than showing an empty screen.
What it is not
LiveTerra passes on what the agencies publish, as soon as it can, and they publish after the fact, sometimes hours after. It is not a warning system, and it never replaces official alerts from your local authorities. If something is happening where you are, follow the people on the ground.
Turning it off
Switch off a single place with the bell in its settings, and the row shows a crossed bell. Switch off a hazard for every place in Settings. Turn notifications off entirely in Settings, or in the phone’s own settings, and the subscription is deleted from our server.