Privacy policy

Browsing the site

You can browse, search and read FindSift without an account. We do not ask for your name, email or address, and there is nothing to sign up for.

What we record when you search

Every search is stored, whether or not you accepted the cookie. For each one we keep:

• the words you typed, and how we read them
• how many results came back and which ones were shown
• which result you opened, if any
• an irreversible fingerprint of your IP address — the same one described below

This is how we find out which questions the catalogue answers badly, and it is the only way to learn that a search returned nothing useful. It is not joined to the profile cookie, it is never sold or shared, and nothing in it names you.

What we record when you click a product link

Outbound links pass through our own redirect before reaching the merchant. That is how we know which products people actually want, and how we check the commission reports we are given. For each click we store:

• which product was clicked, and when
• which page on FindSift you clicked it from
• your browser's user-agent string
• the country your request appears to come from
• an irreversible fingerprint of your IP address — see below

We do not store your IP address

Instead of the address itself we store a SHA-256 hash of it combined with the current date and a secret key held on our server. The hash cannot be turned back into an address, and because the date is part of it, the same visitor produces a different value tomorrow.

This is enough to answer "roughly how many different people clicked today" and nothing more. It cannot be used to follow you across days or identify you.

Cookies

We run no third-party analytics and no advertising scripts. Nothing on this site reports to anybody else.

We set two cookies of our own, and only after you have been asked:

• Your answer to that question. Set whether you say yes or no, so we stop asking. It holds one character.
• What you have been shopping for, and only if you said yes. It records which departments you clicked through to buy from, roughly what those cost, and the last few product or category pages you opened — about a hundred characters, something like "tools:3, automotive:1". We use it to choose which four products the front page shows you, and to decide the order of search results that match your question equally well. It is stored in your browser and sent back to us with your requests so we can read it; it is never shared, never sold, and contains nothing that names you.

Say no and neither the profile nor anything that reads it ever runs — the site behaves exactly as it does for someone visiting for the first time. Change your mind by deleting this site's cookies in your browser, and you will be asked again.

A single session cookie exists for the private administration area, which visitors never reach.

The merchant you are sent to will almost certainly set its own cookies, including the affiliate tracking cookie that records the referral. That happens on their domain under their policy, not ours.

What leaves the site with you

When you click through, our redirect deliberately sends Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, so the merchant is not told which FindSift page you came from. They receive the affiliate identifier and whatever your own browser sends them.

Who else sees this

Nobody. We do not sell, rent or share the data above. It is stored on a single server we control, in Canada, and used only to run and improve FindSift.

Affiliate networks and merchants keep their own separate records of referred traffic, which we can see in aggregate. We have no access to what you buy, what you paid, or your payment details.

How long we keep it

Click records are kept while they remain useful for reconciling commissions and understanding demand. The IP fingerprint is useless for identification after the day it was created, by design.

Your rights

Because we hold no account and no identifier that points back to you, there is generally no personal data of yours on our servers to retrieve or erase. The shopping profile described above is the one thing we keep about you, and it is not on our servers at all — it lives in your browser, and clearing this site's cookies erases it completely and immediately, without asking us.

If you believe we hold something else, contact us and we will look.

Children

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

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, the date at the top changes with it.