Privacy policy

What we collect directly

Nothing. Aperture has no login, no registration, no comment system, no newsletter and no email capture. There is no form anywhere on this site — not even a contact form, because storing your details to answer a message would contradict this page. We do not ask for your name, your email address, your location or your equipment.

The calculators run entirely in your browser. The focal lengths, aperture and eyepiece figures you type are never transmitted anywhere and are never stored — no server call, no cookie, no local storage. Close the tab and they are gone.

Analytics — Google Analytics 4, named plainly

We use Google Analytics 4. Calling it “privacy-conscious analytics” would be a dodge, so: it is Google’s product, it sets Google’s cookies (the _ga family) in your browser, and Google receives the data as well as us. Our measurement ID is public by design and ships in the source of every page here.

What it tells us: which pages are read, where visitors arrived from, approximate country and region derived from IP address, device and browser type, and which links get clicked. We use it in aggregate to decide what to write next. We do not attempt to identify individual visitors, we have no way to tie a session to a person, and we do not sell or share this data with anyone.

One detail worth stating because it is unusual: outbound clicks on our Amazon links are measured by Google’s Enhanced Measurement, not by tracking code we wrote. GA4 automatically records outbound link clicks with the destination URL and the page they happened on. There is deliberately no custom click-tracking script on this site. That tells us which page sent a click to which product — never who clicked. Analytics also does not run on preview builds or on a developer’s machine; it is restricted to the live domain.

Blocking it changes nothing about the site. Any standard content blocker stops it, as does Google’s own Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Every page, calculator and link works identically with analytics blocked, and we would rather you block it than feel uneasy.

Amazon — the cookie, and the images

The cookie. When you click a product link here you are sent to Amazon with our Associates tag attached, and Amazon sets its own cookie in your browser, lasting 24 hours. That is how they attribute a purchase to us. The cookie is Amazon’s, not ours: we never see who you are, what you looked at or what you bought — our reporting shows only anonymous totals of items ordered. But clicking a link here does mean a third party sets a cookie, and you should know that before you click rather than after. See our affiliate disclosure for the commercial side of the same arrangement.

The images, which most sites do not mention. Product photographs on this site are hotlinked directly from Amazon’s image servers rather than copied onto ours. That is deliberate — we do not want to host Amazon’s product imagery — but it has a privacy consequence we would rather spell out: your browser requests those images from Amazon as the page loads, so Amazon’s CDN sees your IP address and browser on any page with a product on it, whether or not you ever click a link. Amazon’s own privacy notice governs what they do with that and with the click cookie.

Hosting and logs

The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server logs — IP address, user agent, the page requested and a timestamp — for operational and security purposes. This is ordinary web-server behaviour and applies to essentially every site you visit. We do not mine these logs and do not combine them with anything else.

Cookie banners, and why there isn't one

There is no cookie banner on this site and no consent-management platform behind one. We are not going to claim a consent mechanism we have not built: analytics loads on page load, and the honest disclosure is this page plus the fact that a content blocker stops it completely. Aperture is a US-focused publication written for US readers, and it is built so that nothing breaks when you refuse the tracking.

Your rights, and where they actually go

We hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing for us to export, correct or delete on request — which is the honest answer rather than a dodge. We have never sold or shared personal information, because we have none to sell.

The data that does exist about your visit sits with the third parties named above, so requests about it go to them directly: Google for analytics data, Amazon for the affiliate cookie and image requests, and Vercel for server logs. Each publishes its own privacy notice and its own request process. If you ask us via contact, we will point you at the right one — that is the extent of what we can usefully do.

To remove the Amazon affiliate cookie, clear cookies for amazon.com in your browser. To avoid it entirely, search for the product on Amazon yourself instead of clicking through — we would rather you did that than not know the option existed.

Children

Astronomy is a hobby plenty of families do together, and children are welcome to read anything here. This site is written for adults choosing and using equipment, is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age — because we collect none at all.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will change the date at the top of the page. There is no mailing list to notify you with, by design. Questions go to contact.