The publicly available Google Maps contribution data gets regularly queried for all Local Guides registered on this site. This data is used to calculate global leaderboards based on points, added photos or else. Additionally, contribution data gets stored to provide historical progress data for Guides.

The Local Guides program is Google's gamification approach to encourage users to maintain Google Maps. Local Guides are people that dedicate their freetime to share reviews and photos, and to correct information on Google Maps. You can find out more about the Local Guides program here.

The leaderboard is not supposed to encourage you to make more (low quality) contributions. As a Local Guide, you should always value quality over quantity of posts. This site is supposed to be an insight into what is going on in the Local Guides program and to dedicate a spotlight for Google Maps' top contributors.

Local Guides trying to spam contributions to jump to higher levels violate against Google's community guidelines and will eventually get removed from the Local Guides program (and also from this site).

Local Guide profiles are automatically crawled and added to this site. If you want to manually add your profile, you can do that here. Please note the following constraints:

• The Google Maps profile has to be opted in to the Local Guides program.
• The Local Guide has to have at least 250 points.
• The profile can have restricted visibility. Its contributions are still visible.

Not all Local Guides might want their profiles to be visible in a public leaderboard. This site therefore anonymizes non-verified profiles to protect the privacy of Local Guides.

Profiles on this site can be verified by their respective owners. The verification process ensures that the profile owner actually opted in to being displayed on this site. Only verified profiles will show up with their names and link to Google Maps.

Additionally, verified profiles have privileges on our site, such as prioritization for data updates.

Refer to the registration form to verify your profile.

Profiles are eligible for contribution data updates once every 7 days (every day for verified profiles). Contribution data will be updated as soon as a profile is eligible and there is free processing capacity. Because there is limited processing capacity, we are prioritizing verified profiles in the processing queue.

Profiles are eligible for country flag updates once every 7 days. The country flag will be updated as soon as a profile is eligible and there is free processing capacity. Because there is limited processing capacity, we are prioritizing verified profiles and profiles that do not yet have a flag in the processing queue.

Photo views can only be queried from public Google Maps profiles. If your profile doesn't show photo views, it is likely that your Google Maps profile has restricted visibility.

The flag does not necessarily show a Guides's nationality but rather the country where the Guide made the latest contributions in. Because country information is processed separately, it can take some time for your flag to show up.

Flags can only be shown for public Google Maps profiles. If your flag doesn't show up, it is likely that your Google Maps profile has restricted visibility.

The heatmap shows you the geographical areas where most Guides are active. It does not factor in the amount of contributions but only represents the rough geolocation of a Guide's latest contributions - which is the same geolocation we use to determine a profile flag.

The heatmap gets updated on a weekly basis.

The heatmap does not work with personal location data, but calculates its own optimistic guess for the general vicinity of a Guide by looking at its latest contributions. This geolocation does not represent a precise location the user has been to. It is the same information people would see if they were to look at a public Google Maps profile.

Additionally, the heatmap data set does not store the geolocation in relation to the user profile. Using the heatmap, there is no way to connect a location back to a specific user.

lgstats.xyz is a user-friendly and completely tracking-free site that respects its users privacy. It only collects data necessary for its functionality and only exposes pseudonymised data.

Following Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of Guides registered on this site gets processed and stored:

• The Google Maps User ID gets stored for every registered Guide in order to query and refresh contributions data. The Google Maps User ID does not get exposed, except when the respective Guide opted in to be publicly visible by verifying the profile.
• The Google User name gets only stored and displayed in case the respective Guide opted in to be publicly visible by verifying the profile.
• No other PII of registered Guides gets processed and / or stored on this site.

Following Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of visitors of this site gets processed and stored:

• The IP address of a site visitor gets temporarily stored for 60 minutes to enforce rate limiting.
• No other PII of site vistors gets processed and / or stored.

• Alpine.js and Pico.css for this frontend.
• Node.js, hapi and MySQL running on a bare metal Kubernetes cluster as backend services.
• Google Cloud and Cloudflare for data storage and processing.
• flagcdn.com for the profile flags.
• OpenStreetMap tiles provided by Stadia Maps for the heatmap.