Privacy policy

The short version

We do not ask you to create an account, we do not sell anything directly, and we do not sell or rent personal information to anyone. Two things do collect data: Google Analytics, and the retailers you click through to.

What we collect directly

The contact form

If you send a message, we receive the name, email address, subject and message you typed. That is used to reply to you and for nothing else. It is not added to a mailing list — there is no mailing list.

Messages are delivered by email through Microsoft Graph and kept in that mailbox. Ask us to delete a message and we will.

Anti-spam checks

The contact form records how long the page was open before you submitted it, and the server keeps a short-lived, in-memory count of submissions per IP address to limit automated spam. Neither is stored beyond the request or used for anything else.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages people read and which buy links get clicked. That means Google sets cookies and receives data about your visit, including a truncated IP address, your approximate location, device and browser, the pages you view, and the events described below.

We use it in aggregate. We are looking at which pages are useful, not at what any individual did.

The affiliate_click event

When you click a buy button we record an event containing the retailer, the product identifier and the page you clicked from. No personal information is attached to it.

It exists because retailers report sales per tracking tag and cannot tell one site from another inside one, so this event is the only way we can see which pages are worth writing more of.

Opting out

Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Analytics entirely, and any content blocker will stop the script loading. Nothing on this site breaks if you do either — the buy links are plain links and the pages are static.

Affiliate links

Buy buttons pass through a /go/ address on this domain, which redirects to the retailer with our tracking tag attached. The retailer — currently Amazon — then sets its own cookies and applies its own privacy policy, which we do not control.

We do not receive information about what you bought or who you are. Affiliate reporting arrives as aggregate totals: how many items, how much commission, and nothing identifying.

The full commercial arrangement is on the disclosure page.

What we do not do

• No accounts, no logins, no passwords.
• No newsletter and no mailing list.
• No advertising network and no retargeting pixels.
• No selling, renting or sharing of personal information.
• No payment processing. We never see a card number, because we never take one.

Cookies

Steep & Spout sets no cookies of its own. Google Analytics sets its own, and the retailer sets theirs when you click through. Blocking cookies in your browser has no effect on this site’s functionality.

Hosting

The site is hosted on Vercel, which processes standard server request logs including IP addresses as part of delivering the pages. Their privacy terms apply to that processing.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal information we hold. In practice, the only personal information we hold is a contact-form message you chose to send us, and we will delete it on request.

Email info@steepandspout.com and say what you want done.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will be noted on the page rather than made quietly, which is the same rule the editorial policy applies to everything else here.