Privacy

The short version

• No cookie is set by this site, for any purpose.
• 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 an individual, not a company, and can be reached through the form at the foot of this page. The site runs on a single server we rent inside the EU, and the data described below never leaves it except in encrypted backups.

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.

A country appears only if a geolocation database file is installed on the server, and it is resolved from that file. No geolocation service is ever contacted, and the address itself is still never stored. 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. The page reports those to our own address on our own domain, with the same one-way hash and nothing else about you.

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

No cookies. The site does keep two small values 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.

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.

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. Backups are encrypted and rotate out on a schedule of days, weeks and months.

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.