What this site does with your data

Every page loads Google Analytics 4 (Google's traffic-measurement tool). It tells me things like which pages get visited, roughly where visitors are in the world (guessed from your IP address, not a precise location), what kind of device and browser you're on, and how you got here — a search, a link, or typing the address in.

I also track a few specific actions so I can tell what's actually helpful: when someone clicks through to Amazon, views a product page, uses the filters and sort options, or submits the newsletter form. None of that includes anything personal about you. The newsletter form logs that a submit happened, never the email address, and it does not send the email anywhere yet.

To tell repeat visits apart, Google Analytics sets a couple of cookies in your browser (the ones named _ga). They don't contain your name or email — just a random ID for the analytics counts.

A few honest notes: analytics only runs on the live site, not while I'm building it locally. If you use a privacy-focused browser or an ad/tracker blocker, it'll block Google Analytics and the site works exactly the same. You can also switch analytics off for your device by adding ?mute-analytics to the end of any page's address — that flips a small flag in your browser's storage that tells the site not to send anything.

Tom's Fishing is part of the Amazon Associates program. The "View on Amazon" buttons and product links are affiliate links, so if you buy something after clicking one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's what keeps the site going — and it never changes how the picks are ranked.

The part that matters for privacy: once you click one of those links, you leave Tom's Fishing and land on Amazon. From that point on, Amazon — not me — is in charge. Amazon uses its own cookies and tracking to credit the referral and to do whatever it normally does on its own site. That's covered by Amazon's privacy policy, which I don't control and can't change. I never see your Amazon account, your cart, or what you end up buying — only anonymous totals of how many people clicked.

The site's fonts are served by Google Fonts. When a page loads, your browser fetches them from Google's servers, which means Google sees your IP address as part of that request. It's a standard way to load fonts and doesn't identify you by name, but it is a connection to a Google server, so it's worth stating plainly.

The only cookies on this site are the Google Analytics ones described above. I don't set any cookies of my own, and there's no login, cart, or session to keep track of.

The site uses your browser's local storage for exactly one thing: remembering that you turned analytics off, if you chose to. It's a single on/off flag and nothing else.

• No user accounts, logins, or profiles.
• No active email newsletter. The signup box you may see is marked "coming soon" and isn't collecting or sending emails anywhere yet.
• No advertising networks or retargeting pixels.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of personal data — I don't collect it to begin with.
• No backend or database storing anything about you.

Tom is 14 himself, and plenty of people getting into fishing are around that age. This site is a gear guide for everyone — it doesn't ask anyone for personal information or knowingly collect it, regardless of age.

If the site starts doing something new — turning on the newsletter, adding a contact form, changing analytics — I'll update this page to match, and bump the date at the top. The goal is for this page to always describe what the site actually does, not a generic template.