Privacy policy

We built DecisionWire to be useful while respecting your privacy. We don't set tracking cookies, we don't sell your data, and we collect only what we need to keep the site working and our research honest. This page says exactly what that means.

Site analytics. We use a privacy-focused, cookieless analytics service to understand aggregate traffic — which pages are read, roughly where visitors come from, and overall trends. It does not use cookies, does not collect personal data, and cannot follow you across other websites.

Outbound-link clicks. When you click a link to visit a vendor, the request passes through our redirector (/go/…) and we record the click so we can measure which comparisons help people decide and keep our affiliate reporting honest. For each click we store: which vendor and page it came from, the referring site, your browser's user-agent string, a coarse country (e.g. "US"), and a salted, one-way hash of your IP address used only to spot bots and duplicate clicks. We do not store your raw IP address, and we set no cookie to do any of this.

Anything you send us. If you contact us or sign up for updates, we keep what you provide (such as your message or email address) to respond and, if you've asked, to send what you signed up for. Nothing more.

We don't set advertising or tracking cookies, build cross-site profiles, run third-party ad networks, or sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We don't use your data to influence what we publish — our facts, scores, and rankings are independent of both vendors and visitors (see our affiliate disclosure).

DecisionWire does not use tracking or advertising cookies. Our analytics are cookieless, and the outbound-click redirector sets none. If we ever use a strictly necessary cookie to make the site function, it will be just that — necessary — and never used to track you across sites. Because we don't set tracking cookies, there's no consent banner to click through.

We keep our stack small and rely on a few infrastructure providers that process data on our behalf, under their own terms:

• Cloudflare — hosting, content delivery, and the edge that runs our redirector.
• Neon — the database where our content and the click log live.
• Plausible — cookieless, aggregate traffic measurement only.

Our pages link out to the vendors we cover. Once you land on a vendor's own site, their privacy practices — not ours — apply, and we have no control over what they collect. Some of those links are affiliate links; see the affiliate disclosure for how that works.

We keep click-log records for as long as they're useful for attribution and fraud prevention, and aggregate analytics for trend reporting. Because outbound clicks are stored against a one-way IP hash rather than your IP, those records aren't tied back to you as an individual.

Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR or CCPA), you may have the right to access, correct, or delete personal information we hold about you, or to object to certain processing. Because we deliberately collect so little — and store outbound clicks against a one-way hash rather than an identifier — there is usually little to act on, but we'll honor valid requests. Contact us and we'll help.

If this policy changes materially, we'll update the effective date above and note significant changes. For any privacy question or request, reach us through the contact link in the footer.