What we count, and what we never collect

What we count

Eleven kinds of event, each a handful of short fields. Every one is listed here, in the words the site uses.

A page opened

Which page, whether it was light or dark, whether it was a phone or a desk, which country you ship to, and whether you are on the free list or a member. If you arrived from somewhere else, the name of that site and nothing more; if you arrived from one of our emails, which email.

The board seen

That the morning board on the home page came into view.

A deal opened

Which product, its grade that day, and where the card was: the board, the deals page, the catalogue, your Locker.

A store link followed

Which store, which product, its grade, the price as a band (under $100, $100 to $249, $250 to $499, $500 to $999, $1,000 and up), and which country you ship to. This is how we know a link earned a commission and which grades send people to stores.

A filter or a search

Which category, grade or country you picked, whether you turned on Only my sizes, which brand you chose. For a search: the words you typed, lowercased and cut to forty characters, and how many results the board showed. Anything with an @ in it is never sent, so a search box can never leak an address.

A size set

Which size fields you filled in: boot, ski, brake, helmet, jacket, pant, gender. Never the values. We count that you set a boot size; we do not learn what it is.

Signing up, choosing a plan

That the free signup form was sent, and how many sizes came with it. On the membership page, which lane you chose: free, a year, a month, or a founding seat.

Watching and rating

A watchlist add or remove, and when the free watchlist was full and refused one. A Locker rating: the stars, the product's category, and whether you wrote a note. Never the note.

Every event also carries the time it happened and a visitor number for the day, explained below. That is the whole row.

What we never collect

• Your email address, in any event, ever. The email list is a separate thing, below.
• Your sizes, your name, your Locker notes, what you typed in a field.
• Your IP address. It is used once, to make the day's visitor number, and never written down.
• Cookies. We set none. There is no id in your browser's storage either, nothing for a later visit to be matched against.
• A fingerprint. We do not read your screen, your fonts, your plugins or your hardware.
• Third parties. No analytics company, no advertising pixel, no social-media script. The measuring script is ours, served from this site, and it talks only to this site.
• Where you went. The address of the page you came from is cut to its site name, and the page you are on is recorded by its name, never its full address.
• Where you are. We do not look up your location from your connection. The country on a row is the one you chose in the Where you are control, because it is what the landed prices are for.

How the visitor count works

We want to know whether 400 people saw the board on Thursday or one person saw it 400 times. We do not want to know who any of them were. So the server makes a visitor number for the day like this: it takes a random key drawn fresh each morning, your connection's address and your browser's description, and runs them through a one-way hash. The result is the same for your browser all day, so your events line up as one visit. At midnight (UTC) the key is replaced and the old one is deleted, so the next day's number has no relation to today's, and nobody, including us, can work backwards from a number to an address once the day is over.

This is the model the open-source analytics project Plausible uses. It means we can say "412 visitors today" and "a third of them opened a deal", and we cannot say "you came back on Tuesday".

How long we keep it

Thirteen months (400 days), then deleted. Ski prices move on a yearly calendar, and the questions we ask the data are "how did March compare with last March" and "did the Black Friday shells go". A year is the shortest span that answers them. Because no row names a person, keeping it that long costs no one anything, and there is nothing in it to delete on request, because there is nothing in it that is yours.

The day's random key lives for one day. The counters that stop a runaway script from flooding the server live for one minute and hold a hash, not an address.

How to turn it off

Three ways, any one of them is enough.

1. Tell your browser. If it sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, we send nothing at all. Not a page view, not a count. Most browsers have the setting under privacy; some extensions turn it on for you.
2. The switch here. It sets one word in this browser's storage, pulse=off, and the measuring script reads it before doing anything. It applies to this browser only, so set it again on your phone.
3. Block the script. It is one file, pulse.js. A content blocker that stops it loses nothing on the site; every page works without it.

The switch appears here when the measuring script is on the page. If you do not see it, the script is not running, and nothing is being counted.

The email list

The list is separate from the counting above. Nothing from one is ever joined to the other.

When you sign up, we keep your email address, the sizes you listed, the country you ship to, and whether you are on the free list or a member and since when. That is what it takes to send a Thursday digest in your size and nothing in it you did not ask for. We also keep a line per email we sent you: which one, when, and whether it went, never the message; those lines are deleted after 400 days. Members also have a watchlist and a Locker on the list, so alerts can be filtered to what they own and watch.

• Leaving takes one click. Every email carries an unsubscribe link in its footer that works without signing in, and a pause link that stops alerts for thirty days. Those links, and the one that changes your sizes, are signed links: there is no sign-in, each one expires 180 days after the email it came in, and a copied link does nothing more than the footer it was copied from. Unsubscribing clears your sizes and marks the address off the list so nothing is sent to it; the address itself stays on that do-not-send record so a mistake on our side cannot put it back. Write to us to have it erased outright.
• No tracking pixel. Our emails carry no invisible image to tell us whether you opened them. Links back to the site carry a short tag naming which email they came from (?via=email-digest), which the site reads once and removes. The tag never names you.
• Never sold, never shared with a sponsor or a store. The one sponsor slot in the free digest sees a count of how many people received the digest, not who.
• Delivered by [email provider: Resend], which handles the sending and holds the address for that purpose under its own terms. We will name it here plainly when the list goes live.

Store links and commissions

We earn a commission on some links. It did not affect the grade. When you follow a link to a store we count that you did, as described above, and the store's own site takes over from there under its own policy; many stores set their own cookies to credit the sale to us. We do not see what you bought or paid, only the commission statement later, which names the store and the amount and not you.

The cheapest reputable seller is linked even when it pays us nothing, and the link is counted the same way.

What stays in your browser

Today, your profile, your sizes, your Locker and your watchlist are saved in your browser's own storage and nowhere else. They never leave your device; the site reads them to narrow the board. Clearing site data removes them. When the engine goes live, a member's sizes and watchlist will be held on the list, as the section above says, so alerts can be sent to you.

Who to write to

Questions about this page, the list, or anything we hold: [contact email]. Dialed is run by [legal entity name], [postal address: street, city, region, postcode, country]. If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top moves and the digest says so.