Privacy

Two things, both about instruments rather than about people.

When you answer the "Was this right?" question at the bottom of a result, we record the serial number you looked up, the brand, the version of the rules that answered you, your yes or no, and anything you typed into the optional box. That's our data-quality loop: it's how a wrong reading gets found and fixed, and when it produces a correction, the correction is published on the methodology page. This record is written only when you answer the question.

When the decoder can't place a serial number at all, we record the number and the brand it was checked against, so that missing coverage gets prioritized by how often people actually run into it. That one is written as the page renders, without you doing anything, and it happens only for a number nothing in our data matches.

Neither record contains your IP address, and neither contains anything that identifies you. A serial number identifies an instrument, not a person, and we hold nothing that could connect one to you.

The one thing this site always writes to your browser is your choice of light or dark theme, stored under the key gs-theme. It never leaves your device, and you can clear it whenever you like. Whether the site also sets an analytics cookie depends on where you are.

The site sets no analytics cookie inside the EU or EEA, the United Kingdom or Quebec, and none when we can't place you at all. In those cases PostHog, the analytics service we use, runs in a mode that keeps nothing between visits: no cookie, no browser storage, nothing that survives a reload, no session recording, and no profile built for you. It still counts page views, decodes and clicks, along with crash reports and page-speed measurements, but it can't connect one visit to the next.

Everywhere else, PostHog sets its own analytics cookie so a return visit is recognized as the same visitor. It may also record how a session moves through the site: where the pointer goes, what gets clicked, what the decoder returns. That's how we find where people get stuck. Anything typed into the feedback box is masked before it leaves your browser. The serial number you decode isn't masked, because a serial number on its own doesn't identify a person. We also set a small cookie, gs-cl, that records only that this fuller mode applies to you, so the next page doesn't have to ask again.

In both cases PostHog is served from this domain, and the request that carries your activity to it is assembled by our own server, so we choose what goes into it.

Cloudflare hosts this site and handles every request to it. PostHog receives the analytics events described above. When a page shows what comparable instruments are listed for, we ask the marketplaces for that through their official interfaces, from our own server. Your browser doesn't contact a marketplace until you choose to follow a link, and their terms govern from that point on.

We sell nothing to anyone, and we share nothing beyond what is described on this page. Your IP address reaches our server, as it must for the site to answer you at all. We use it for two things. It's the key that rate-limits the two endpoints you can post to, so neither can be flooded; it isn't written to any record we keep. And, only for visitors outside the EU, EEA, United Kingdom and Quebec, our server passes it to PostHog along with the analytics request, so that PostHog can work out which country a visit came from. PostHog then discards the address and keeps only the country. For visitors inside those regions the analytics request carries no IP address at all.

Write to support@gearserials.com with the serial number in question and we'll remove the record. The feedback box on any result page reaches us too, though it only opens its text field after you answer "no", so the address is the surer route.

You can ask what we hold that relates to you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. The same address handles all three: support@gearserials.com. Since we hold no accounts and no contact details, tell us the serial number and roughly when you looked it up, which is what lets us find the row.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the United Kingdom and you think we have handled something badly, you can also complain to your national data protection authority. You do not have to come to us first.

A feedback record earns its place by correcting the data, and a miss record by showing us which coverage gap people actually hit. We keep both while they are still doing that work, and we delete either on request. We have not set a fixed deletion schedule yet; when we do, it will say so here.

When what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to announce it on, so the date is the notice.