Privacy

The short version

There is nothing to log in to, no newsletter, no comments and no forms. We do not ask you for your name, your email address or anything else, because there is nowhere on this site to type it. What we do have is Google Analytics, and our own record of when a sponsor or product block was seen or clicked. You can switch both off for your browser, below, and the switch is honoured on our server as well as in your browser.

Cookies

The site sets one cookie of its own, and only when you interact with an advert:

• cs_uid. A random identifier, set for five years. It is not set when you read an article. It is created the first time a sponsor or product block is actually visible on your screen, or the first time you click one. If you never scroll an advert into view and never click one, you leave this site without it. We use it to avoid counting the same device twice and to tell a real click from an automated one, which matters because most of the clicks recorded here are not people.
• cs_optout. Only if you use the switch above. It records that you opted out, for five years. An opt-out has to be remembered somehow, so this is the one cookie it cannot avoid.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies when it loads. Amazon sets its own once you are on Amazon. Neither is ours to describe, and the opt-out above stops Analytics from loading at all.

The site also uses your browser's session storage for three things: the last advert shown, so the next one is different; your country, so a product link goes to the right Amazon; and a random session id. All three are deleted when you close the tab, and none of them leave your browser except the session id, which appears on the rows described below.

What we record, exactly

When a sponsor or product block is seen or clicked, we write one row to our database. That row contains:

• Which advert, where on the page, and where it pointed.
• The path and full URL of the page you were reading, and the referring URL if there was one.
• A one-way hash of the cs_uid cookie, and a separate one-way hash of your IP address. We do not store your IP address. Both hashes are salted, so they cannot be turned back into the original value, and the hash of the cookie is not derived from your IP or your browser at all. It is a pseudonym for the cookie and nothing more.
• A shortened copy of your browser's user-agent string, the first 200 characters. That is not hashed. In practice it is the whole string, and it says what browser and operating system you are using. We keep it because it is the main way an automated agent gives itself away.
• Whether you were on a phone or a desktop, your country as our host reports it, a random session id, the time, and our own verdict on whether the event looked automated.

That is the only table this site writes to. There is no profile, no reading history across pages and nothing that we could use to work out who you are.

We have no retention schedule. Those rows are kept indefinitely at present, because nothing in the code deletes them. We would rather say that plainly than print a number we do not honour.

Who else is involved

• Google Analytics (property G-M0826FTYQB) measures which pages are read. It loads for every reader who has not opted out, and sends Google the usual page and device information. We also send it a flag when our own checks think a visit is automated, which is how we keep bot traffic out of our reports.
• Amazon. Product links go through our own redirect and on to Amazon with our affiliate tag attached. From there, Amazon's privacy policy applies. The tag tells Amazon the visit came from us; it does not tell us anything about you.
• Vercel hosts the site and keeps ordinary server logs. Supabase stores the rows described above.
• Nature Lion Inc. Advert counts are also copied to our own internal system so performance can be compared across the sites we run. That copy deliberately carries no identifiers: no cookie id, no hashes, no user-agent and no referring URL.

Our typefaces are served from this site, not from Google Fonts, so reading a page here makes no request to Google for fonts.

Opting out

Use the switch above. It turns off Google Analytics for your browser, stops advert impressions being recorded, and stops a row being written when you click a product link. Product links keep working and keep our affiliate tag, because that is how the site is funded and it identifies us to Amazon rather than you to us.

The switch applies to the browser you are using. Blocking cookies or using an ad blocker achieves much the same thing, and nothing here tries to work around either.

Your rights

Nature Lion Inc. is a Canadian company, so Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) applies. You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, by writing to info@naturelion.ca.

In fairness we should say what that will get you. We hold no name, no email address and no account, so the only way to find rows that relate to you is the cs_uid value in your browser. If you send it to us we can find and delete those rows. If you have cleared your cookies, there is genuinely nothing left that we can connect to you, which is a real limit on the right rather than an excuse.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle a request you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Children

This site is written for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child.

Changes

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. We will not quietly broaden what we collect and leave the wording as it was.

Getting in touch

Contact and corrections has the details. For anything about privacy specifically, write to info@naturelion.ca.