What we collect, and why
When you reach out to us — whether that’s dropping us a message, pitching a guest post, or asking about advertising — you’re naturally going to share some info with us: your name, email, maybe your company name, and whatever else you include. If you go ahead and buy advertising or a sponsored post, our payment processor handles the actual card details; we never see or store your full card number.
We also pick up some technical stuff automatically just by you visiting the site — your IP address, what browser and device you’re using, how you found us, which pages you looked at. That comes through cookies and analytics tools, and it’s mostly there so we can understand what’s working on the site and what isn’t.
None of this is collected just because we can. Every piece of it goes toward something specific: answering you back, processing an order, publishing the content you sent us, figuring out how people actually use the site, and making sure our ads are relevant rather than random.
Cookies
Yes, we use them some are ours, some come from tools like analytics platforms or ad networks. They help the site function properly and let us understand traffic and show ads that are somewhat relevant instead of totally random. If you’d rather not have them, your browser settings let you block or clear cookies whenever you like. The site will still work, just maybe a little less smoothly in places.
Where advertising fits in
Since ads are part of how this site runs, some of what you see is served by outside ad networks, and they may drop their own cookies to track things across sites, not just ours. That part is genuinely out of our hands — their own privacy policies cover what they do with that data, not ours.
If you send us a guest post or sponsored content, we’ll obviously use the details you gave us — byline, links, company name — to actually publish it. That’s kind of the point of submitting it in the first place.
Do we share your info?
We don’t sell it. Never have, don’t plan to.
We do work with a handful of outside services to keep things running payment processors, hosting, email tools, analytics, ad partners and they see what they need to see to do their job. Beyond that, the only other time we’d hand anything over is if the law required it, or if it was genuinely necessary to protect our site, our users, or ourselves.
How long we hold onto it
Basically, as long as it’s useful for the reason you gave it to us — answering your message, delivering something you paid for, keeping a record of published content — and a bit longer after that in case we need it for our own records or legal reasons. If you want it gone sooner, just ask us. See the contact info below.
What you can ask us to do
Wherever you’re located, you can always ask us what info we have on you, get a copy of it, have us fix something that’s wrong, or have it deleted. If marketing emails or tracking aren’t your thing, you can opt out of that too. If you’re in the EU or UK, this is basically what GDPR guarantees you. In California, CCPA covers similar ground. Either way, you don’t need to know the legal terminology — just email us and tell us what you want.
About kids
This site isn’t built for children, and we’re not trying to collect anything from anyone under 13 (or 16, depending where you’re from). If it turns out a child’s info ended up with us somehow, let us know and we’ll take it down.
Keeping things secure
We do the sensible things secure connections, limiting who can access what, working with providers we trust. But we’ll be honest: nothing sent over the internet is ever 100% airtight, so we can’t promise perfection, only that we’re taking it seriously.
If this policy changes
Things evolve — our site, our services, the tools we use — so this policy might get updated from time to time. When it does, we’ll bump the date at the top, and if it’s a meaningful change, we’ll try to flag it clearly rather than bury it.
Get in touch
Got a question about your data, or want us to do something about it? Just email us: Editer@timesofsilicon.com