Policy

Privacy

This site sets no cookies, loads no third-party scripts, and has nothing in its pages that follows you around — no analytics beacon, no ad pixel, no session recorder. What it does have is the ordinary access log every web server keeps, and those lines are counted. This page says what that means, because a page claiming to collect nothing at all would be lying.

What is collected when you buy

There is no checkout on this site. Buying is an email conversation, so what is collected is what you send: your email address and your message. Payment is arranged by reply, under the privacy policy of whichever payment service handles it, and no card details ever touch this server. The files are sent to you by email.

That email address is used for exactly two things: sending you the files and replying if you write in for support or a refund.

Buying does not subscribe you to anything. There is a mailing list, described below, and the only way onto it is to ask for it. Your address is not sold, shared, or passed to anyone.

The mailing list

There is a list that announces corrected layers and new releases. Your own state's free map is what you get for joining it; nothing else on this site is behind it, and buying does not put you on it.

Two things are collected: the address you type, and the state you asked for. Nothing else — no name, no purchase history, and nothing joining the address to an order.

The list is hosted by AWeber, which stores the address and sends the mail under its own privacy policy. Confirmation is double opt-in, so an address typed in by someone else never receives anything, and every send carries a one-click unsubscribe.

The form is a plain HTML form that posts to AWeber when you submit it, and AWeber then returns you to a page on this site. The state is required because it selects which map you are sent. Until you press the button nothing of theirs loads in the page and no cookie is set, which is why the promise at the top of this page still holds.

Server logs, and what is counted

The site is static files behind AWS CloudFront, which records a line per request: IP address, timestamp, requested path, user agent, and the country the IP resolves to. Those lines are delivered to a private S3 bucket in the same AWS account, nobody else can read them, and S3 deletes them automatically after 90 days.

They are counted, and it is only fair to say what is wanted from them: how many people read a given page, and nothing finer than that. The buy buttons are plain email links, so there is no buy click to count. It is measured this way, from server logs, precisely so there is nothing in the page doing the measuring.

What is not done with them: they are not joined to purchase records, not joined to a mailing-list address, and not used to build a profile of anyone. Counting happens in aggregate, and after 90 days there is nothing left to count.

Where your data lives

Order records are the emails themselves, in the support mailbox, plus whatever the payment service used for your order keeps under its own policy. Mailing-list addresses live with AWeber in the United States. Server logs never leave the AWS account behind this site, and go to no third-party analytics service because there isn't one. Mail you send to support@ passes through AWS (us-east-1) and lands in the operator's inbox; the transient copy in S3 is deleted automatically after 14 days. Payment records are retained as long as tax rules require, which is a matter of years rather than months.

Asking for deletion

Email support@preparedground.com and your address is removed from everything except the payment records that have to be kept for accounting. For the mailing list alone, the unsubscribe link at the foot of any send is faster and does the same thing.