Privacy policy

• There are no accounts on Macrostack. We never ask who you are in order to read it.
• We measure how the site is used with two analytics tools, described below. One of them, Google Analytics, sets cookies.
• We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we carry no advertising trackers.
• Some links are affiliate links. We are told that a sale happened, never who bought.
• Block analytics with any content blocker and the site works identically. Nothing is withheld.

Macrostack is operated by Fandhaal Studio LLC, a limited liability company registered in Ohio, United States. For anything in this policy, write to team@macrostack.net. A postal address is available on request for legal correspondence.

Hosting. The site is served by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel necessarily processes your IP address and request details in order to send you the page. We do not receive, store or analyse those logs ourselves.

Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights. Cookieless, aggregate measurement of page views, referrers, country, device type and page speed. It does not identify you or follow you between sites.

Google Analytics 4. Records page views and a small number of events: a click on an affiliate link, a click to request a dataset, and what is typed into our own site search. It sets first-party cookies (such as _ga) to tell one visit from another, and reports approximate location and device type. Google states that Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. We do not use Google’s advertising features, and we do not link this data to a name or an email address — we have neither.

That is the whole list. There is no advertising pixel, no session recording, no fingerprinting and no cross-site tracking on this site.

We have built a consent-based system for understanding which topics are being researched — a consent banner, a first-party identifier and an events database. We say so here because it is in our public code. It is switched off, it collects nothing, and its database is empty. You can check this yourself: /api/intent reports the live state.

If we ever switch it on, this page will change first, the banner will ask before anything is recorded, declining will be as easy as accepting, and it will never store your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string or the full address of the pages you read.

Links marked as sponsored go to a vendor, sometimes through an affiliate network such as CJ, Awin, Impact, Rakuten or Reditus. When you follow one, that vendor or network may set its own cookie so that a purchase can be credited to us. That happens on their site under their privacy policy, not ours. What we receive is a report that a sale occurred and what it paid — not your name, your email or what else you bought. How these links relate to our rankings is set out in our terms and affiliate disclosure.

Two of our datasets are shared by request on Hugging Face. The request form is Hugging Face’s, and it asks for your name, your company or institution, a work email and what you are evaluating. Hugging Face shows us those answers so that a person can approve the request. We use them to decide access and to understand who finds the data useful. We do not sell them or add you to a mailing list, and we will delete your request if you ask.

You can also request a dataset by email. Then the only thing we hold is the email you sent — your address and whatever you chose to tell us about who you are and what you are evaluating. It is used for the same two purposes, kept in our mailbox, and deleted on request.

If you email us, we keep the correspondence for as long as it takes to deal with it. Where a newsletter sign-up is offered, your email address is held by our email provider, Buttondown, for that purpose only, and every message carries an unsubscribe link.

• Vercel Inc. — hosting, cookieless analytics and speed measurement.
• Google LLC — Google Analytics 4.
• Hugging Face, Inc. — hosts our datasets and the request form.
• Neon Inc. — a database in the United States that currently holds no personal data.
• Buttondown — email, only if you subscribe.

All are based in the United States, so data about visits is processed there. We do not sell or share personal information as those words are used in California law, and we do not take part in any data co-operative or intent-data marketplace.

Google Analytics is set to keep visit-level data for two months; after that only aggregate totals remain. Vercel’s analytics are aggregate from the start. Dataset requests stay in Hugging Face until you or we remove them.

You can block Google Analytics with a content blocker, with Google’s own opt-out browser add-on, or by refusing cookies in your browser. The site does not change.

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our processing of your personal data, and to complain to your data protection authority. If you are in California you have the right to know, delete and correct. Because we hold no accounts, the only personal data we are likely to have about you is a dataset request or an email you sent us. Write to team@macrostack.net and we will answer within 30 days.

Macrostack is a tool for people choosing software and infrastructure. It is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their data.

If what we collect changes, this page changes first and the date above moves. If we ever begin consent-based collection, we will ask — we will not rely on your having read this page.

This policy was written by the people who run the site, not by a lawyer. We have tried to make every sentence checkable against what the site actually does; if you find one that is not, tell us and we will fix the page or the site.