Privacy policy

Life Calculator runs lifecalculator.space. This page sets out, in ordinary language, what does and does not happen to information while you are here.

Start from the fact that shapes everything else: the arithmetic on this site is done by your own device. A calculator page is a document plus a small piece of JavaScript. When you fill in a field, the value is held in a variable belonging to that page and nowhere else. It is not posted to us. It is not written to disk. Once the tab closes it is gone, and nobody -- ourselves included -- ever held a copy.

#Your entries

Salaries, balances, dates, weights, odometer readings, utility bills: whatever you type into a field here stays on the machine you typed it on. No calculator on this site has a submit button that reaches a server, because there is no server-side computation for it to reach. A quick test settles the point -- open a calculator, put the device into airplane mode, and carry on using it. It works, which it could not do if the numbers were travelling anywhere.

The single thing this site keeps in your browser is a note of whether you asked for the light or the dark theme. It lives in local storage under the key lc-theme, it is not a cookie, it goes nowhere, and it identifies nothing. Clearing your browser's site data removes it, after which the site reverts to its default appearance.

#Things we never ask for

There is no sign-up here, no login, no comment box, no newsletter and no enquiry form. We consequently hold no name, no email address, no postal address, no telephone number, no date of birth and no health or financial record belonging to you, and could not produce one if asked.

If you choose to write to us, the message obviously reaches us, together with whatever return address your mail program attaches. We read it, act on it and reply. Threads about a reported error are filed alongside the correction they produced, so that the record of the fix stays intact; everything else is deleted once the matter has been dealt with. Nothing arriving in our inbox is added to a mailing list, because we operate none.

#What passing traffic leaves behind

The pages are delivered by a commercial static host, Netlify. Sending a file across the internet takes a request and a response, and like any web server the host's infrastructure keeps a technical note of that exchange: the address the request came from, which file was wanted, the time, the user-agent string the browser announced, and the page you arrived from. Those records belong to Netlify, are held under Netlify's own privacy terms, and exist so that the site can be served, faults diagnosed and abusive traffic turned away. We do not mine them and we join them to nothing.

No measurement script runs on these pages. There is no Google Analytics tag, no Plausible, no Matomo, no heatmap recorder and no session replay -- nothing whose purpose is to follow one visitor from page to page.

#The advertisements

Nobody pays to use this site; its running costs come out of the display advertising that appears in the margins and between sections. Those slots are filled by outside advertising networks, among them Google AdSense and the partners it distributes through, and the technology they bring with them is the one place where information about your browsing is genuinely in play.

What those networks do, in their own right rather than at our direction:

• Vendors other than us, Google included, rely on cookies and comparable storage to pick advertisements according to visits you have already made, here and elsewhere on the web.
• Google's advertising cookies let Google and the companies it works with choose what you are shown by reference to pages you have opened on this site, on other sites, or on both.
• Ad networks and their vendors may write and later re-read cookies in your browser, or fire a beacon or a pixel, as a by-product of filling an advertising slot on a page here.
• What that machinery gathers can include the requesting IP address, characteristics of the device and the browser, which pages loaded, and an inferred set of interest categories. None of it reaches us in a form that names anyone, and the audience profiles it feeds are invisible to us.

One boundary deserves stating plainly, because it is the point of the whole site: an advertising script sharing a page with a calculator cannot see what you put into the calculator. Field values sit in JavaScript variables belonging to our own code. They are never written into the page text, never placed in storage another script can read, and never handed to anything loaded from a different domain.

Turning personalization down or off:

• Google's own controls sit at Google Ads Settings.
• A large slice of the industry can be dealt with in one pass through the Network Advertising Initiative tool or the YourAdChoices page.
• Refusing or deleting cookies in the browser works too, and costs you nothing here: every calculator behaves identically with the cookie jar shut.

The cookie policy walks through the categories one at a time.

#Readers in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom

The technical processing described above -- delivering pages, keeping server records, defending the site against abuse -- rests on our legitimate interest in running a working website. Advertising storage that is not strictly necessary stands on a different footing: it needs your permission, which our advertising partner asks for through whatever consent interface it presents in your region, and which you may take back later through that same interface or by clearing the storage yourself.

The rights you hold are the familiar ones. You may ask what personal data we have about you, ask for it to be put right or wiped, object to what is being done with it, ask for processing to be restricted, and complain to the supervisory authority for your country. In practice the honest answer to the first of those is nearly always "none", because a visitor who never writes to us leaves nothing behind that we hold. Where you have written to us, say so and the thread goes.

#Readers in California

Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you may ask which categories of personal information are collected, ask for deletion, ask for a correction, and direct a business to stop selling or sharing personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. No money changes hands over anybody's data here, so there is no sale in the ordinary sense. The advertising storage described further up may nonetheless amount to "sharing" as California defines the word. Two routes are open: the opt-out links listed above, and the Global Privacy Control signal, which several browsers and extensions can transmit automatically and which advertising partners are expected to act on wherever the law makes it binding. Using any of these costs you nothing and changes nothing about the service you receive.

#Age

What we publish is written for adults, and the site is not aimed at anyone under the age of 13. Personal information is never knowingly taken from a child, which is a low bar given that we take none from anybody: no field on this site asks how old you are or who you are. If you have reason to think a child has emailed us something personal, tell us and the message will be destroyed.

#Where information physically sits

Personal information is not sold here, not rented and not traded. Exactly two kinds of outside organization touch the running of the site: the company that hosts the files and the networks that fill the advertising slots. Both are large international businesses with infrastructure spread over many countries, so records they generate may come to rest outside the country you are reading from, the United States included. Those movements happen under whatever safeguards each of those providers maintains for itself, not under any arrangement of ours.

#Keeping the site sound

Everything is delivered over an encrypted connection, and the site sends a Strict-Transport-Security header so that browsers refuse to drop back to unencrypted HTTP on later visits. The strongest protection here, though, is architectural: there is very little to break into. Pages are flat files. No database exists, no account system exists, and no calculation you trigger touches our infrastructure, which removes whole families of attack that apply to sites built any other way. What we cannot promise is the safety of an email you send us -- ordinary mail crosses systems we have no hand in, so please keep anything sensitive out of one.

#Following a link away from here

Our pages point outward often, usually at a statute, an agency publication or a standards body, so that you can check a figure at its source instead of taking our word for it. A link is a citation, not a recommendation. From the moment you land on somebody else's site you are subject to their rules and their data practices, over which we have neither control nor visibility.

#Revisions

When this document changes, the date shown at the top of the page changes with it. If a change is substantive -- a new recipient of data, a new category of information -- it will be spelled out in words rather than slipped in quietly.

#Asking us something

Anything about this policy, and any request arising from it, goes to privacy@lifecalculator.space and is answered by a person.