Privacy policy

Scope

This policy explains what this website collects, why, how long it is kept, who else is involved, and how to have it removed. It covers this site only, not any third-party site you reach from a link here.

The short version: there are no accounts, no logins and no profiles. The only personal information the site stores is an email address, and only if you type one into the digest form yourself.

What is collected

Server logs

Like every web server, this one records requests: the IP address, the page requested, the time, the HTTP status, the referring page and the browser's user-agent string. Logs exist to keep the site running and to detect abuse and automated scraping. They are not used to build a profile of you and they are not combined with anything else.

Your email address, if you give it

If you submit the digest form, we store the address, the topic you signed up to and the page you signed up from. Nothing else — no name, no attempt to enrich the record from another source, no tracking of what you open.

Contact messages

What you write in the contact form, with your email address and any name you supply, is forwarded to the editorial inbox so we can reply. Contact messages are never written to the site's database; they live in an ordinary mailbox and are kept only as long as dealing with the message and any follow-up requires. If the mail relay is unavailable at that moment, the message is written to the server log instead so that it is not silently lost, and it is removed with the rest of the logs.

Advertising data collected by others

Third-party advertising networks set and read their own cookies and identifiers when advertising is displayed. That collection is theirs, under their policies, not ours — see the advertising section below.

What is not collected

No accounts, no passwords, no payment details. The site takes no payments and stores no financial account information of any kind.

Calculator inputs stay in your browser. Figures typed into a yield, ladder, cap-rate or other calculator are used by your own device to compute the result on the page; they are not transmitted to us or stored anywhere on the server.

Google Analytics measures which pages are read and how readers arrive; the cookies and storage page explains exactly what it sets and carries the switch that turns it off. Beyond that there is no advertising pixel of ours, no session recording, no heatmapping and no fingerprinting attempt.

Cookies and browser storage

The site itself sets one cookie — lang, and only when you pick a language from the switcher. Google Analytics, described above, sets its visit-measurement cookies (_ga, and one _ga_* for this site); declining on the cookies page removes them. There is no session cookie and no tracking cookie of ours.

A few things are remembered in your browser's local storage: the colour theme, whether you prefer the Guided or Expert view, your chosen language, the list of securities you have starred as Saved, and — where advertising is switched on — your answer to the cookie bar. Every one of them lives on your own device, is readable only by this site, is never transmitted to the server, and disappears when you clear your browser data. The Saved list in particular is not an account: we never see it, and it does not follow you to another browser or device. Each key is listed individually on our cookies and storage page.

Third-party advertising is a separate matter, and it does involve cookies.

Google AdSense, third-party cookies and personalised advertising

Advertising slots on this site are served through Google AdSense when advertising is switched on. No advertising network is loaded at the moment, so no advertising cookie is being set on this site today. This section describes what happens when it is, and it stays on this page in both states so that the change is visible rather than silent.

The disclosure, in the terms the network itself uses: third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve advertisements based on your prior visits to this website and to other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve advertisements to you based on your visit to this site and to other sites on the internet. This is what "personalised advertising" means.

What that involves concretely: an identifier stored in your browser, not your name; the address of the page you are on, your IP address, your approximate location derived from it, and your device and browser details, sent to the advertising network by your own browser when the slot loads. We receive none of it. We do not upload any list, any email address or anything from the digest signups to an advertising network, and we operate no pixel, tag or audience of our own.

United States state privacy laws describe advertising of this kind as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and it is disclosed here on that basis. Where the law requires consent before advertising cookies are set — in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom in particular — that consent is requested through the consent mechanism the advertising network operates, before those cookies are used.

What you can do about it. Three separate controls exist and they do different things. Google's own advertising settings turn personalisation off at the network. The industry opt-out pages do the same across many other vendors at once. Your browser's controls — blocking third-party cookies, private browsing, a content blocker — stop the cookies being stored at all. The links for the first two are in the next section, Advertising, and how to opt out.

Two honest limits on those controls. Opting out of personalisation does not remove advertising; it makes what appears less specific to you. And an opt-out is itself usually remembered in the browser it was set in, so it does not follow you to another browser or another device. Nothing on this site stops working if you block all of it: there are no cookies of ours to break, every page renders identically, and the data tables, calculators and Learn library are unaffected.

Advertising, and how to opt out

Advertising slots on this site are filled by third-party ad networks, principally Google. Google and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to serve and measure advertising, and may personalise what you see based on prior visits to this and other sites.

• You can opt out of personalised advertising by Google at Google Ads Settings.
• You can opt out of personalised advertising from many other vendors at the Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out page and the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.
• How Google uses information from sites that use its services is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
• Your browser's own controls — blocking third-party cookies, private browsing, a content blocker — work here as they do anywhere.

Opting out of personalised advertising does not remove advertising; it makes what appears less specific to you. Where consent is legally required for advertising cookies, it is requested through the consent mechanism operated by the advertising network before those cookies are used.

We do not sell your personal information

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent, trade or broker your details, and we do not operate a lead-generation business: nothing you submit is passed to a broker, bank, lender, fund sponsor or platform.

We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, as that term is used in United States state privacy laws. No advertising network is currently loaded on this site. If display advertising is switched on, this section will say so and will explain the controls available to you before it happens.

The only parties that ever touch personal data on our side are the infrastructure providers that make the site work — the server host and the email provider that carries the digest and contact messages — and they act on our instructions for that purpose only.

One third party is contacted by your browser rather than by us: the site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, so your browser makes a request to Google's font servers when a page opens, and that request carries your IP address and browser details as any web request does. We receive nothing from it and set no cookie through it. A browser extension that blocks third-party requests will stop it, and the site remains fully readable in your system's default fonts.

We disclose information otherwise only where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse of the site.

How long it is kept

Server logs are kept for a short operational period sufficient to investigate faults and abuse, and are then discarded. Digest email addresses are kept until you ask to be removed, after which the record is deleted. Contact messages are kept while the matter is open and for a reasonable period afterwards in case you write again about the same thing.

Your rights and how to use them

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information is held about you, to obtain a copy, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to opt out of its sale or sharing (which does not arise here, because neither happens), and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of those rights.

To exercise any of them, write by email to madisonlabs.ai@gmail.com or through the contact form and say what you want done. For a deletion request, sending it from the address in question is the quickest way for us to identify the record; if you cannot, tell us the address to remove. We will not ask you to create an account or pay a fee to make a request.

Because we hold so little — an email address, or nothing at all — most requests are simple to answer. Where a request cannot be honoured in full, we say which part and why.

Children

This site is intended for adults and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has submitted an email address here, tell us and we will delete it.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, and the database that holds digest signups is not reachable from the public internet. No system is perfectly secure, and no transmission over the internet can be guaranteed, but the amount of personal data here is deliberately kept close to nothing, which is the most effective protection available.

Visitors outside the United States

The site is operated from, and its data is stored in, facilities that may be outside your country. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the legal bases we rely on are your consent (for the digest, which you can withdraw at any time) and our legitimate interests in keeping the site available, secure and free of abuse (for server logs). Advertising cookies rely on consent collected through the advertising network's consent mechanism.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the revised version is posted here with a new review date at the top. Where a change materially affects what is collected or why, it will be described rather than slipped in.

Contact

Privacy questions, access requests and deletion requests: write by email to madisonlabs.ai@gmail.com or through the contact form.