Privacy policy

The short version

• We do not sell your personal information.
• We do not run advertising trackers or third-party analytics.
• We do measure our own pages — which listings were shown and clicked — so the businesses listed here can see what their listing did. It is first-party only, never shared, and it is not tied to you.
• We do not set marketing cookies. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
• We only collect what you type into a form, plus the minimum needed to stop abuse.

What we collect

Information you give us

When you submit a form, we store what you entered. Depending on the form that includes:

• Your name, email address and, if you supply it, phone number.
• Your preferred contact method.
• Your project description, city or ZIP code, timing, budget range and any notes.
• Which business the enquiry relates to, if any.
• The page you submitted from, and the date and time.
• The fact that you ticked the consent box, and when.

Information collected automatically

• A hashed form of your IP address. We do not store your IP address itself. It is converted to an irreversible hash and used only to rate-limit form submissions and to record which administrator performed an action.
• Your browser user-agent string, stored only for administrator login sessions.
• Standard server logs generated by the web server, retained briefly and rotated automatically.

Information kept in your browser, not sent to us

Your saved businesses, your comparison list and any in-progress Ask Placersession are stored in your own browser’s local storage. They are never transmitted to our servers. Clearing your browser data deletes them permanently, and we cannot recover them.

Cookies and browser storage

The only cookie we set is an administrator session cookie, and only after an administrator logs in. It is strictly necessary, contains an opaque random token, and is not used for tracking. Ordinary visitors are not given a cookie at all.

We do store one value in your browser’s session storage: a random identifier used to group a single visit’s page views together. It is created fresh each visit, it is deleted when you close the tab, it is never sent to anyone else, and it is not linked to your name, email or any form you submit. Its only purpose is counting — so that ten page views in one visit are not reported to a business as ten different people.

Measurement

Businesses pay to be listed and promoted here, so they are entitled to know what that bought. We record events such as: a listing appeared in results, a listing’s profile was opened, a website or phone link was clicked. Each record holds the listing, the category and city it was shown for, roughly what kind of device you used, and the time.

It does not hold what you typed into search or Ask Placer, what you wrote in a project description, your IP address, your name, or your email. We do not build a profile of you, we do not follow you to other websites, and we never sell or share this data. Businesses only ever see totals for their own listing — never anything about an individual visitor.

What we use it for

• To review your project request and try to match it to suitable local businesses.
• To reply to you if you asked us to.
• To review listing claims and reports.
• To prevent spam and abuse.
• To keep an audit record of administrative actions.

We do not use your information for profiling, ad targeting or automated decision-making.

Who we share it with

Today: nobody. No email provider, SMS provider, CRM, analytics service or advertising network is connected to this site. Submissions are stored in our own database and read by our own administrators.

When we begin passing project requests to businesses, that will be the point of the form and will be stated clearly on the form itself before you submit it. We will update this policy before that happens, not after.

We may disclose information where legally required, or where necessary to investigate abuse.

Where it is stored

In a PostgreSQL database on a private network on our own server, in a data centre operated by our hosting provider. The database is not reachable from the public internet.

How long we keep it

• Project requests, contact messages, claims and reports: kept while operationally useful, reviewed periodically.
• Rate-limiting records: automatically deleted after a short period.
• Administrator sessions: expire automatically and are deleted.
• Audit records: retained as a security record.

Your rights

California residents have rights under the CCPA/CPRA, including the right to know what we hold about you, to have it deleted, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined, so there is nothing to opt out of.

To make a request, contact us. We will need enough information to locate your records and to be reasonably confident the request is genuinely yours.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. Where a form concerns youth sports instruction, we expect the parent or guardian to be the person submitting it.

Security

Traffic is encrypted with TLS. Administrator passwords are hashed with scrypt. Session tokens are stored only as hashes. IP addresses are stored only as hashes. The database is not publicly exposed. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the review date at the top and describe the change here.

Contact

Questions about privacy: contact us.