Privacy policy

We keep as little as we can get away with. This page says what that is, and it is written from what is actually in our systems rather than from a template.

What we never hold

Your card details. Payment happens on Stripe’s own page. Your card number never reaches us, so there is nothing card-related in our database for anyone to steal.

What we hold

• Your email address, so you can sign in and so we can send you the order.
• Your orders — what you bought, what you paid, and when it was delivered.
• The account login we sold you, encrypted, until it is deleted (see below).
• When you first revealed that login, and the IP address it was revealed from. This is our evidence if a payment is later disputed. It is the strongest proof that an order was genuinely delivered, and it protects honest buyers from having the shop shut down by fraudulent chargebacks.
• IP addresses, briefly, to rate-limit sign-ins and checkouts. This is what stops someone testing stolen cards against us.
• Anything you send us in a claim or a support email.

How long we keep it

The login we sold you stays visible for 30 days, or until you mark the account as secured — whichever happens first. Then we delete our copy permanently. We do not want to be holding working passwords, and you do not want us to either.

Order records — who bought what, when, and for how much — are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to. Those never contain a password.

Counting visitors without naming them

We count how many people see a page, where they arrived from, and how many go on to buy. Doing that honestly needs one thing: some way of telling one visit apart from another. Here is exactly what that is.

We do not set a cookie to count you, and we never write down your IP address or your browser’s user-agent string. What we write is a hash — your IP address and user agent, mixed with a secret and with today’s date, put through a one-way function and shortened. It cannot be turned back into either. And it is not the same tomorrow: at midnight the date changes and every one of those identifiers changes with it, so nothing we hold can follow you from one day into the next.

Alongside it we keep the site you arrived from — the domain only, never the full address — any campaign tags in the link you followed, the country and region your connection resolves to, and whether you are on a phone or a computer. We deliberately do not keep your city. That is the whole list.

If you buy something, the order is stamped with where that visit came from, so we can tell that a sale came from a forum thread rather than from a search. Your email is on the order because you gave it to us to receive the thing you bought. It is not attached to anything you did before you bought it.

If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, none of this happens at all — no page view, no visit, no attribution. Nothing is recorded.

Why we are allowed to do this without asking first. Counting a page view stores nothing on your device and reads nothing from it, so the cookie rules do not reach it. What reaches it is the general rule about handling data at all, and the ground we rely on is our own legitimate interest in knowing whether a shop works: no profile is built, no address or user agent is written down, and the identifier is destroyed every night. That ground comes with a right to object, and objecting has to actually work — so it does, from three places, all of which end at the same line of code.

Who gets asked. If your connection resolves to the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, a notice appears at the bottom of the page with an Accept and a Reject, weighted the same because we do not prefer either answer. If we cannot tell where your connection is, you are asked as well — we would rather ask somebody who did not need it than miss somebody who did. The country comes from the same lookup that decides which price you are shown, and it is not written down for this.

What Reject does. Counting stops from your next page view onward, and stays stopped on this browser. It does not delete what was already written, because those rows carry no identifier that could find you and the one they do carry is gone at midnight anyway. You can change your mind at any time, in either direction, from your privacy choices below.

The cookies we set, in full. The ones that keep you signed in; one that remembers what is in your cart; one called rf_consent that holds nothing but the word granted or denied for a hundred and eighty days, so that we do not ask you again; and, only if you are somewhere we have to ask and have not yet answered, one called rf_ask holding the digit 1 until you close your browser, which is how the page knows to show you the notice at all. And, if advertising measurement is switched on for you — see the next section — the ones Google’s tag writes, whose names all begin _gcl_, chiefly _gcl_au. Those are Google’s, not ours, and they last up to ninety days. That is the whole list. There is no analytics script and no tracker of any other kind on this site.

Advertising measurement

We buy ads on Google. To know whether an advert we paid for led to a sale, Google’s tag runs on this site and tells Google when an order completes, along with the amount and the currency. It sets the cookies named above.

It is never told which order. The address of your order page is the thing that unseals your login, so it is not sent — not as a page address, not as a transaction number, not under any other name. Google is told that a purchase happened and what it was worth, and that is the entire message. The page addresses it does receive are stripped to the shape of the page, so /buy/godpack rather than anything naming you, and any page that could identify you is reported as /other.

Where it is switched on. Nowhere that we have to ask you first. If your connection resolves to the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom — or we cannot tell where it resolves to — nothing from Google loads at all unless you press Accept on the notice. Everywhere else it loads unless you have refused, which you can do below, at any time, and which takes effect on this browser from that moment on.

The one thing we publish about you

If you bid in an auction you pick a bidder name, and that name is public. It appears on the auction you bid in, on the result afterwards, and on the list of everyone who has bid before. That is the whole of it: your email address, your order history and the account behind the name are never shown next to it, and nothing on a public page can be used to work out which customer a name belongs to.

You choose the name yourself, so choose one you are happy to be seen under. It cannot be changed afterwards, and that is on purpose — a record of who won what would mean nothing if the names in it could be swapped out later. If a win goes unpaid, the name stays on the result marked unpaid, which is the only reason bidding can cost nothing up front.

Who else sees it

Stripe processes payments and holds the card details we never see. Beyond that we use ordinary service providers to run the site — cloud hosting, a database, and an email service — who process data only on our instructions. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. Ever.

We will hand over data if the law requires it, and we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Your choices

Whether we count your visits is yours to decide, wherever you are and whether or not you were ever shown the notice.

Email support@996.monster and you can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. We will do it. The only thing we may have to keep is the order record itself, where accounting law says so — and we will tell you exactly what was kept and why.

You can also delete the stored login yourself at any time by marking the account as secured on your order page. That is immediate and it is not reversible.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top. The terms cover the rest of the relationship.