Privacy

The short version

We do not ask who you are. There are no accounts, no logins, and no mailing list. We do not sell or share your personal information, we do not run advertising, and we do not store your IP address. The only thing we record about you is that a link was clicked — and even that is stored in a form that cannot be traced back to you.

Traffic analytics

We use privacy-focused analytics that count pageviews without cookies and without tracking you between sites. They collect no personal data and build no profile of you. There is no Google Analytics on this site and no advertising pixel of any kind.

Affiliate link clicks

When you click through to a merchant, we record the click: which page it came from, which position on that page, a coarse device type (mobile, tablet, or desktop), the country the request came from, and the referring page. This tells us which recommendations are useful. It does not tell us who you are.

We do not store your IP address. To tell repeat clicks apart within a single day, we store a one-way cryptographic hash derived from your IP address, your browser, and the date. A hash cannot be reversed back into the values that produced it, and because the date is part of it, the result changes every day. It cannot accumulate into a profile.

Click records are deleted after 24 months.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies for ordinary visitors. There is one cookie in the whole system — a sign-in cookie for the site owner’s private admin area — and it is never set on a normal visit.

Merchants are a different matter. When you follow one of our links, the merchant or their affiliate network will usually set their own cookie so they can credit the sale to us. That cookie is theirs, set on their site, under their privacy policy. Your browser settings control it, and blocking it costs you nothing.

What happens after you leave

Once you land on a merchant’s site you are subject to their privacy policy, not ours. We never see your order, your name, your address, or your payment details. What we receive back from an affiliate network is an anonymous report saying a sale happened and what commission it earned — never who made it.

Who else processes data

We use a small number of providers to run the site. They process data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes:

• Vercel — website hosting and delivery
• Neon — database hosting
• Cloudflare — domain name resolution

These providers operate servers in the United States, so if you are visiting from elsewhere your request is handled there.

Legal basis, if you are in the UK or EU

Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies, we rely on legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) to record anonymous click counts — the interest being understanding which of our recommendations readers find useful. Because we store no identifiers and no personal data, this is a minimal intrusion, and we consider it proportionate.

You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or object to the processing of your personal data, and to complain to your data protection authority. In practice we hold nothing that identifies you, so there is generally nothing to retrieve or erase — but ask, and we will tell you honestly what exists.

If you are in California

Under the CCPA and CPRA you have the right to know what personal information is collected, to have it deleted, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing.

We have never sold or shared personal information, and we do not intend to. We do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There is no “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link on this site because there is nothing to opt out of. Exercising any of these rights will never cause us to treat you differently — we would not know it was you.

Children

This site is intended for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

Traffic to this site is encrypted in transit. We keep the amount of data we hold deliberately small, on the principle that the safest data is the data you never collected. No system is perfectly secure, but there is very little here worth stealing.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of the page will change with it.

Contact

Questions, or a request about your data, go to privacy@walnutwool.com. We answer real questions from real people.