Privacy

The short version

• No cookie is set unless you sign in, and then only to hold your session.
• No third-party analytics, advertising or tracking script runs on any page.
• Your IP address and your user agent are never stored.
• Nothing collected here is sold, shared or sent to another company.
• You can read the whole site without giving us anything at all.

Who is responsible

SubBegone is run by Samuele Ongaro, an individual rather than a company, who is the data controller for everything described here and can be reached through the form at the foot of this page. No email address is published anywhere on this site — one in a public page is harvested within days — so the form is the way in, and it reaches a person.

The site runs on a single server rented inside the EU, in Finland. The data described below never leaves it except for the nightly copy described underhow long it is kept.

What is recorded when you read a page

The server that answers your request writes one row about it. That row holds the path you asked for, the site that linked you (its hostname, and the referring address where your browser sent one), your browser's primary language tag, coarse buckets for device, browser and operating system, the response code and how long we took, and a one-way hash.

The hash is an HMAC-SHA256 of your IP address and your user agent together, salted with a secret only this server holds. Neither the address nor the user agent is written anywhere. They are inputs to a one-way function and are discarded once it has run. The hash exists only so that two page views can be recognised as probably the same reader, which is what makes a visitor count possible without identifying a visitor.

The row also holds your country, resolved from a database file sitting on this server — DB-IP's free IP-to-Country Lite. No geolocation service is ever contacted, the address itself is still never stored, and nothing finer than the country is worked out: no region, no city, no coordinates.

One field on that row is about us rather than about you. A link we post elsewhere can carry a tag saying where we posted it — utm_source=reddit and the like — and when a link you followed carried one, it is recorded with the visit. Browsers increasingly send no referrer, and this is the only way left to know which of our own posts brought somebody here. How we count sets out the measurement side in full.

What is recorded when you use a page

Some things happen in your browser and the server would otherwise never see them: a search you typed and how many results it found, a filter you pressed, a link you followed out to a vendor, how long a page was open and how far down it was scrolled, a prompt you copied, a sponsor's card arriving on your screen and how long it stayed there. The page reports those to our own address on our own domain, with the same one-way hash and the same coarse buckets — country, device, browser — that a page view carries, and nothing else about you.

The sponsor figures exist because a slot is sold against them, and they are counted per slot: how many times a card was on screen, how long for, and how often it was clicked. A sponsor is shown those numbers for their own card. No sponsor is ever told anything about a reader, because there is nothing to tell them.

Search terms are stored as typed, so please do not type anything personal into a search box on any website, including this one.

Storage on your device

One cookie, and only if you sign in: it holds a random token that says which session you are, nothing about you, and it is removed when you sign out. Nobody who has not signed in is given a cookie by this site, ever.

Two small values also live in your browser's local storage, and both exist to make the interface behave the way you left it:

• sbg-theme — whether you chose light or dark.
• sbg-voted — which entries you have already marked as replaced, so the button stays pressed.

Neither is sent to the server, neither identifies you, and clearing your browser's site data removes both.

One more is kept only while you are signing in from the middle of the suggestion form: what you had typed, held in that tab alone so the form can be handed back to you filled in. It never leaves your browser, it is deleted the moment you get it back, and closing the tab deletes it anyway.

If you sign in

Signing in is optional and the whole site works without it. There is one way to do it — with a Google account — and pressing that button tells us what Google chooses to share: your email address, your name, your profile picture, the language your account is set to, and a permanent identifier Google uses for your account. We ask for nothing beyond that, and Google does not give us your date of birth, your contacts, or anything in your Google account.

Your email address and name are kept in clear, because an account is no use as a hash. It is the only personal data this site holds about anybody.

Your name is public if you suggest a tool. Suggesting one needs an account, the entry credits you by name, and you get a page of your own listing what you contributed. That page shows those entries and nothing else — not what you read, not what you saved, not when you were last here. Your email address is never on it, and neither is anything else about you. If you never suggest a tool, nothing about you appears anywhere on this site.

Signing in does not start closer watching. The same things are recorded about your visit as about anybody else's — the page, the country, the coarse device — and signing in attaches your account to them rather than opening a second, more detailed record. What changes is that those rows can now be gathered together and shown to you.

The lawful basis is your consent, given by pressing the button, and you can take it back at any time. Ask us to delete your account and it is deleted: the email, the name and the picture are erased, and what is left is a row with no person in it so the counts of a past month do not silently change. Ask for a copy of what we hold and you will get one. Either way, use the form at the foot of this page.

Sessions expire after thirty days. Signing out ends the session here, not only in your browser, so the cookie cannot be used again afterwards.

If you give us your email

The weekly digest is the only place an email address is stored, and only if you type one in. It is kept in clear, because a digest cannot be sent to a hash, along with the date and the same one-way hash of the request. It is used to send the digest and nothing else, it is never sold, shared or passed to an email marketing company, and every message carries a one-click unsubscribe that keeps working forever. You can unsubscribe at /unsubscribe or by writing to us.

Nothing is being sent yet. The digest has not started, so today the only thing that happens to an address is that it is written down and left alone, on this server, in the same database as everything else here. It sits there until the first issue is written, which is the first and only thing it will be used for. An address given now and an address given the week it starts are treated identically, and the same address sent twice is stored once. If you would rather not wait to see what we do with it, unsubscribe before it starts and it is removed from the list.

If you suggest a tool

A submission stores what you typed — a name, a domain, an optional note — with the date and the one-way hash, which is there to stop the form being flooded. Please do not put personal information in the note.

AI, and what is never fed to it

Entries on this site are drafted with an AI coding agent from the vendor pricing pages we archive, and then reviewed by a person — set out in full here.

Nothing you send is part of that. Your email address, your message, your suggestion and everything recorded about your reading stay in our own database, are read by a person, and are never used to train a model or passed to anyone who might.

Why we are allowed to do this

Measuring how a site is read, in a form that identifies nobody and involves no third party, is our legitimate interest in knowing whether the thing we publish is worth publishing — and the figures are published openly rather than kept. An email address is processed on your consent, given by typing it in, and withdrawn by unsubscribing.

How long it is kept

The event archive is the point of this project — it exists to show how prices and verdicts move over years — so those rows are kept indefinitely and are never edited or deleted. They contain no identifier that can be traced back to a person.

An email address is kept until you unsubscribe. Submissions are kept while they are useful editorially.

A copy of the database is taken nightly and sent off this server to storage we rent, over an encrypted connection, where it is held encrypted at rest by the provider. It is not separately encrypted by us, which is worth stating plainly rather than implying otherwise: anyone holding those storage credentials could read the copy, and the addresses in it are in clear because a letter cannot be sent to a hash. Copies rotate out on a schedule of days, weeks and months. The salt that makes the reading records unlinkable is notin the backup.

Your rights, and one honest limit

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to it, or ask for a copy. For an email address or a submission, that is straightforward: use the form below and it will be done.

For the reading records, there is a limit worth being upfront about. Those rows hold a salted one-way hash and nothing else that points at a person — which means we cannot work out which rows are yours, and neither can anyone who obtains the database. That is the privacy property; the cost of it is that there is nothing for us to look up on request. If the salt is ever rotated, every hash written before it becomes unlinkable to every hash written after.

If you think we have got any of this wrong, tell us. If you are in the EU or the UK you may also complain to your national data protection authority.

Changes

If what we collect changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Nothing on this page is legal advice.