Privacy policy

What we collect — and what we don't

The site itself is a set of static pages. There are no accounts, no login, no newsletter wall, and no comment system, so there is nothing here that asks you to hand over personal information to read a review.

If you allow it, we run first-party analytics for referral attribution — the thing that lets us show a partner that a sale came from our recommendation, which is how this site is funded. It is our own code sending data to our own server. Three kinds of event are recorded:

• Page view — pages opened after optional analytics is allowed.
• Affiliate click — when you follow a recommendation through our go.verdictify.net redirect, which is also what credits the referral.
• Outbound click — when you follow any other link off the site. We record the destination's host and path only, never its query string or fragment.

Each event carries the two random ids described below plus the page address without its query string or fragment, the page title, the referring page, your time zone, and your window and screen size. It does not carry your name, email, or any account — we have never asked you for one — and we do not buy, merge, or enrich it with data about you from anywhere else. Like any web server, our hosting also keeps short-lived technical logs (such as IP address and user-agent) for security and to keep the site running. We do not use any of it to follow you across other websites or to build an advertising profile.

Cookies & local storage

Here is the complete list of what this site stores in your browser. Nothing else is set, and none of it is a third-party or advertising cookie.

• vf-theme — local storage, kept until you clear it. Remembers whether you chose light or dark mode. Never leaves your device.
• vf_vid — local storage, a random id with no expiry. Distinguishes one browser from another so repeat visits are not counted as new people. Sent with every analytics event.
• vf_sid — session storage, a random id cleared when you close the tab. Groups one visit's events together. Sent with every analytics event.
• vf_sid — cookie, the same random id, scoped to .verdictify.net and refreshed for 30 minutes at a time. This is the only cookie we set. It exists so that when you click through to go.verdictify.net, that redirect can be matched to the visit it came from — which is the referral proof itself.
• vf_consent_v3 — local storage, your versioned optional-analytics choice. The legacy vf_optout flag is still honoured as a denial. Never leaves your device.

Where it goes: analytics events are sent to go.verdictify.net — our own server on our own domain, run by us. They are not sent to Google Analytics, an advertising network, a data broker, or any other third party, because we do not use any. The ids are random values generated in your browser; they are not derived from your identity and we hold nothing that maps them back to a person.

Your analytics choice

We honour browser privacy signals automatically. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control (Brave and DuckDuckGo send it by default; Firefox has it as "Tell websites not to sell or share my data") or the older Do Not Track signal, our analytics does not run at all — no analytics ids are created and nothing is sent.

Optional analytics starts off. You can allow or deny it here for this browser. Turning it off deletes the vf_vid, vf_sid ids and the vf_sid cookie that are already stored.

The setting lives in this browser only, so you would need to set it again in another browser or on another device. Clearing your site data for verdictify.net removes everything in the list above. With no saved choice, optional analytics returns to its default off state.

Affiliate links & third parties

Some of our links are affiliate links. When you click through to a partner or an affiliate network, that company may set its own cookies and collect data under its own privacy policy — which we don't control. Once you leave Verdictify, you're on their site and their terms.

We keep these arrangements transparent. Read our affiliate disclosure for exactly how affiliate links, commissions, and the /go redirect work, and why they never influence a verdict.

We don't sell or share your data

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we do not "share" it for cross-context behavioural advertising in the sense California's CCPA/CPRA uses that word — there is no ad network, no data broker, and no third-party tracker on this site. We're funded by affiliate commissions on genuine recommendations, not by monetizing an audience profile. That is also why we honour Global Privacy Control automatically rather than asking you to fill in a form.

Where this applies

Verdictify serves readers in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, and this policy is written for those markets — including California's CCPA/CPRA, whose opt-out signal we honour as described above.

The European Union is not a target market for this site. The local optional-analytics choice described here is not a claim that Verdictify operates a complete GDPR compliance program.

Contact us

Questions about privacy, or a request about your data? Email us at hello@verdictify.net and we'll get back to you.