Privacy Policy

The short version

We do not ask you for anything. There is no account, no login and no newsletter. The only personal information we ever receive is what you type into the contact form, and that goes to one email address.

Two third parties do see something: Google Analytics, which tells us which pages get read, and the retailers we link to, who see a referral when you click a buy link.

Analytics

Block & Beaker uses Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are read and which are ignored. It records the pages visited, roughly where in the world the visit came from, the type of device, and how visitors arrived.

We also record a affiliate_click event when somebody clicks a buy link, which tells us that a click happened and which product it was for. It does not tell us who clicked, and it does not follow you to the retailer.

Google is a separate company and processes this data under its own terms. If you would rather not be counted, browser-level analytics blocking works on this site and nothing breaks when it is on.

Affiliate links

Buy links on this site pass through our own domain first — a redirect at /go/ — before sending you to the retailer. That redirect adds our tracking tag to the destination and records nothing about you.

The retailer then sets its own cookie so that a purchase can be attributed to us. That cookie is the retailer’s, governed by the retailer’s privacy policy, and we never see who bought what — affiliate reporting shows us totals, not people.

Amazon in particular publishes its own privacy notice covering this. Our side of the arrangement is set out on the affiliate disclosure page.

The contact form

The form asks for your name, email address, a subject and a message. All four are sent to info@blockandbeaker.com and nowhere else. Your email address is used to reply and for nothing else.

We do not add contact-form addresses to a mailing list. We do not have a mailing list. We do not sell, rent or pass on anything you send us.

The form has three anti-spam measures: a hidden field that only automated submissions fill in, a check on how long the form was open, and a limit on submissions from one address in an hour. The last one means we briefly hold your IP address in memory on the server. It is not written to a database and it does not survive a restart.

Cookies

Block & Beaker sets no cookies of its own. There is no login, no basket and no preference to remember, so there is nothing for a first-party cookie to do.

Google Analytics sets cookies. Retailers set cookies when you arrive from one of our links. Both are third parties operating under their own policies.

Children

This site is written for adults buying presents for children. It is not directed at children, we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13, and there is nothing here for a child to sign up to.

What we do not do

• Sell, rent or share personal information with anybody
• Run advertising networks or retargeting pixels
• Operate a mailing list or send marketing email
• Ask you to create an account
• Build a profile of you across visits beyond what analytics does

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted.

In practice the only personal data we hold is emails people have sent us. If you have written to us and would like that deleted, email info@blockandbeaker.com and we will delete it and confirm.

For analytics data, Google is the controller of what it holds and browser-level blocking is the most effective way to stop it being collected in the first place.

Changes

If this policy changes, the last-updated date at the top of this page changes with it. We do not update it silently, in the same way we do not correct pages silently.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to info@blockandbeaker.com.