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Privacy Policy

This site is primarily for the information of merchants who may be interested in working with me. However, as a privacy activist, I understand user concerns about privacy and will do my best to explain to anyone who lands on this site how I practise what I preach.  

1: Information I get from affiliate networks

Affiliate networks provide tracking URLs that drop a cookie on a user's browser. The purpose of this cookie is to identify the fact that an affiliate drove a user to a merchant's site, so if the user buys something, the affiliate gets rewarded with commission. I typically add a parameter to this URL to identify which ads are leading to sales and which are not. When I look at my statistics on an affiliate network, I typically see:
  • The values of different sales a merchant made as a result of the traffic I drove to them (and therefore the commission I get, which is often a percentage of that value);
  • The click date and time and the sale date and time (also the cancellation date and time if someone buys something and sends it back);
  • The parameter added to the URL. For instance, if I am promoting a merchant who sells jeans and they are categorised by brand, I might have a different parameter for ads for Levi jeans than for Wrangler jeans and therefore adjust my strategy for promoting them based on how many times their parameters appear in the statistics, i.e. which is selling better.  
  • On some affiliate networks, it specifies whether the sale was made on a mobile device or a standard computer.  
I do not see any personally identifiable information about who bought what.  

2: Information I get from search engines

Search engines need no introduction, but when I am looking at my performance on search engines, I see:
  • How many times my ad was seen and clicked on in a given time period (which can be broken down as far as hourly);
  • Things that were typed into the search engine that caused it to show my ad;
  • Aggregate geographic information about where my ad is being seen or clicked on (which can be broken down as far as town/city).  
Once again, I do not see any personally identifiable information about who searched for what or clicked on what. Fear not, if you have the world's worst spelling or are searching for really odd things, I have no idea who you are.  

3: Information I keep about merchants

Merchants should already be aware of most of the information affiliates hold about them, because the merchant is usually the one making this information available, either because they have posted it on the affiliate network site or emailed the affiliate. As well as this information, for EU-based merchants, I also keep a record of the company's official name and address (as published on their website) when raising VAT invoices. Under the EU reverse charge VAT scheme, unless the affiliate network has a self-billing scheme in place, I am legally obliged to raise a VAT invoice and send it to the affiliate network even when the merchant is located in another member state and the VAT is therefore zero-rated.  

4: Where to find the privacy policies and settings for sites I work with

For search engines (this is where users give consent before clicking on search engine ads like mine):
For affiliate networks:
Needless to say, all the above sites' privacy policies remain the responsibility of the sites in question.