Privacy policy

What we collect

The Homestead Shelf does not ask you to create an account, and we do not collect names, addresses or payment details.

If you email us, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to write. We use it to reply and nothing else.

The mailing list

If you enter your address in one of the sowing-reminder forms, we store that address so we can email you when the sowing windows open. That is the only reason we hold it. We do not ask for your name, we do not sell or rent the list, and we do not pass addresses to the companies whose products we review.

The list is held by our email provider rather than on this site, so their processing terms apply alongside this policy. Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes the address rather than merely silencing it. You can also ask us to delete it directly, at hello@thehomesteadshelf.com, and we will.

Analytics

We use Microsoft Clarity to understand how pages are actually used, and search engine webmaster tools to see which queries bring people here. Clarity does more than count visits: it records a playback of the session — mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and the pages visited — and aggregates those into heatmaps. We use it to find where a page confuses people, not to identify anyone, and we do not try to work out who a session belongs to.

Clarity masks text input by default, so anything typed into a field is not captured. It is a Microsoft product and their processing terms apply; Microsoft may use the data as described in their privacy statement. Browser Do Not Track and most content blockers stop it loading at all, and nothing on this site depends on it working.

We also use Google Analytics, which counts visits and records which page you arrived on, roughly where you came from — a search engine, a link on another site — and which links you followed, including when you click through to a product we review. We use it to work out which guides are worth writing more of. It does not tell us who you are, and we do not combine it with anything that would.

Both of these set cookies in your browser and both send data to their respective companies, whose own privacy terms apply. Blocking cookies or using a content blocker stops both, and the site works exactly the same either way.

Affiliate links

Some outbound links are affiliate links. When you click one, the destination site and its payment processor may set a cookie recording that the visit came from us, so any resulting sale can be attributed. That happens on their site under their privacy policy, not ours.

We do not receive your personal information from those purchases. We see aggregate commission reporting only. More about how affiliate links work.

Cookies we set

This site does not set advertising or tracking cookies of its own.

Third parties

Pages are served through a hosting provider, which processes standard server request data such as IP address and user agent for security and delivery. Fonts are served as part of the site build.

Your rights

If you have emailed us and want that correspondence deleted, ask and we will delete it. Contact details are on the contact page.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of this page.