Privacy policy

What we collect directly

Nothing. Damp Down has no login, no registration, no comment system, no newsletter and no forms of any kind — there is no field on this site that sends anything anywhere. We do not ask for your name, your email address, your location or anything about your building.

The calculators run entirely in your browser. The area, dampness and temperature figures you enter are held in the page while you are on it and are never transmitted to us, because there is nothing in this site’s code that transmits them. They are not saved either: we do not use cookies, localStorage or any other browser storage of our own, so closing the tab discards them and reloading starts from the defaults.

Analytics: Google Analytics 4

This site loads Google Analytics 4 from googletagmanager.com on every page. We use it to see which pages people find useful and which links get clicked — GA4’s enhanced measurement reports outbound clicks by itself, which is how we know whether a recommendation was any use. We have added no custom tracking code beyond that.

Be clear about what that means: Google receives your IP address, your user agent, the pages you view and the links you click, and Google Analytics sets its own cookies in your browser to recognise a returning visit. That data is processed by Google under Google’s terms, not ours. We see only aggregate reports; we do not upload user IDs, we do not attempt to identify individual visitors, and we do not sell or share this data with anyone.

We do not run a consent banner, and this site does not detect or honour a “Do Not Track” header — no such logic exists in our code, and we would rather say so than imply a protection we have not built. What does work is any standard content blocker or a browser that blocks third-party scripts: the analytics tag simply does not load, and every page, calculator and link on this site works exactly as normal without it. We would genuinely rather you block it than feel uneasy.

🔴 Product images are served by Amazon, before you click anything

This is the part most affiliate privacy policies leave out. Product photographs on this site are not copied onto our server — they are loaded directly from Amazon’s image CDN (m.media-amazon.com) by your browser, as the page renders.

The consequence is that on any page carrying a product image, Amazon’s servers receive a request from your browser — including your IP address, your user agent and the page you are on — whether or not you ever click a link. Opening a buying guide is enough. Pages with no product on them, such as this one, make no such request.

We do this because hotlinking is what Amazon’s program expects for product imagery, and it guarantees you are seeing the current photograph rather than a stale copy. But it is a real disclosure and you should have it before you browse, not after. A content blocker that blocks third-party images will stop it, at the cost of the pictures.

Amazon affiliate links

When you click a product link here you are sent to Amazon with our Associates tag attached. Amazon then sets its own cookie in your browser, lasting 24 hours, which is how it attributes a purchase to us.

That cookie is Amazon’s, not ours. We never see who you are or what you bought — our reporting shows anonymous totals of items ordered and nothing that identifies a person. But a click here does result in a third party setting a cookie, and you should know that before you click rather than after. See our affiliate disclosure for the commercial side of the same arrangement; Amazon’s own privacy notice governs what they do with the data.

Hosting and logs

The pages here are static files served by our hosting provider [HOST PENDING], which keeps standard server logs — IP address, user agent, the page requested and a timestamp — for operational and security purposes. This is ordinary web-server behaviour and applies to essentially every site you visit. We do not mine those logs and do not combine them with anything else. (This provider is named as soon as the site’s domain and hosting are final; we would rather leave a visible gap than name the wrong company.)

Your rights, honestly stated

We hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing for us to export, correct or delete on request — that is the factual position, not a dodge, and it is checkable from the fact that this site has no database and no forms.

It also means we have no rights-request mechanism of our own, no data-subject portal and no “do not sell my personal information” switch, because there is no collection for one to act on. Data held about you by the third parties above is theirs: requests about analytics data go to Google, requests about your Amazon activity go to Amazon, and requests about server logs go to our host once it is named above. Ask us and we will point you at the right place, but we cannot action such a request ourselves.

To remove the Amazon affiliate cookie, clear cookies for amazon.com. To avoid it entirely, look the product up on Amazon yourself instead of clicking through — we would rather you did that than not know the option existed.

Children

This site is aimed at adults dealing with damp basements, crawl spaces and other buildings they own or maintain. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone of any age.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we change the date at the top of the page. There is no mailing list to notify you with, by design. Questions go to contact.