Privacy
Effective Oct 4, 2026. Updated Oct 17, 2026: the Advertising section was added.
What we store, and why
- Your email, when you buy, list a business or subscribe, to deliver what you asked for and to send sign-in links.
- Orders, kept for 7 years for accounting. The PayPal payer email is stored only as a one-way hash in the payment record.
- Listings you create: the business name, phone, website, description, categories and counties are public while the listing is live. Your sign-in email is never shown.
- Letter subscriptions: your email and, if you give it, your county. Counties are only ever shown to businesses as regional totals of 10 or more readers, never individually.
- IP addresses, only as salted one-way hashes, used for rate limits and to count flags and reports fairly.
- Plan links contain only your answers' codes, never your name, address or email.
What we don't do
No tracking cookies, no analytics services, no social media pixels, no selling or sharing of your data. The only outside service the pages load is the banner ad from adengine.us on the public guide pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total. Cookies: a session cookie and a security (CSRF) token, both needed for forms and sign-in.
Advertising
The public guide pages of Pond & Shore PA (home, the permit navigator and permit guides, the Lake Erie page, the pond size calculator, plants, the care calendar, lake boards, the glossary, Sources & Verification, the grass carp dealer list, the Pond & Lake Pros directory and its rules, the shop page, About and Help) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. Product and checkout pages, orders and downloads, your library, project plan links, listing pages and forms, the letter sign-up, this page and the other legal pages show no ad.
To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.
- No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
- How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
- What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
- Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
- Nothing about you is sold or shared.
Payments
PayPal processes every payment; we never see your card or bank details. PayPal's privacy policy applies to what you give PayPal.
The Seasonal Pond Letter is double opt-in with one-click unsubscribe. Receipts, downloads, sign-in links and listing notices are sent when needed.
How long we keep things
Orders: 7 years. PayPal payment notifications: deleted after about 13 months. Email logs: 6 months. Unconfirmed sign-ups: 14 days. Unverified listing drafts: 7 days. Expired listings: deleted a year after they end.
Your choices
Sign in to your library to change email preferences or delete your data. Deletion removes your email and listing text; the payment record itself is kept without your email.
Children
The site isn't directed to children, and you must be 18 or older to buy or list.