Why is there no cookie banner on ClickTug?

Because there is nothing to consent to. We set no cookies at all and store nothing on your device for measurement purposes, so the rules that require a consent banner for storing or reading information on your equipment are not engaged. The one thing we do store, your dismissal of the 18+ notice, is a preference you set by clicking a button.

Do you know who I am?

No. We never store your IP address. What we store is a one-way hash of your address combined with a secret that changes every day, which means the same visitor produces a different value tomorrow and no value can be turned back into an address without a key we hold separately.

What do the tools I click through to collect?

That is entirely up to them and their policies apply once you leave, not ours. It is why every listing on this site records the vendor's stated retention period, whether they train on user content and how deletion works, with a link to the policy we read it from, before you click.

Privacy policy

Short version: ClickTug sets no tracking cookies, stores no identifiers on your device, never records your IP address, and shares nothing with a third-party analytics service, because there is no third-party analytics service on this site.

What we collect, and why

ClickTug records two things, and only on listing pages.

A page view. When a listing page is open in a visible browser tab for at least 1.5 seconds. Prerendered and prefetched pages, which your browser may load without you ever seeing them, are excluded.

An outbound click. When you click through from a listing page to the tool it describes.

We record these because the entire point of this site is publishing how many real people choose each tool. Our methodology explains what is counted and what is filtered out.

What is stored with each event

The tool the event relates to.
The date and time.
A pseudonymous visitor value, described below.
A per-page-load random session value, held only in your browser’s memory and never written to your device.
Your country, your network operator’s identifier, and whether the browser is a mobile one. All supplied by our infrastructure provider.
A coarse browser family, for example “firefox”. The full browser identification string is never stored.
The page the event happened on.

The visitor value

We do not store your IP address anywhere, at any point.

What we store is a truncated one-way hash of your IP address, browser identification string and language preference, combined with a secret salt that changes every day. Three consequences follow, and they are the reason it is built this way:

The value cannot be reversed into an IP address without our salt key, which is not stored alongside the data.
The same visitor produces a different value tomorrow, so activity cannot be linked across days.
The value is meaningless outside our own database.

Its only purposes are to stop the same person’s repeated clicks counting more than once, and to identify automated traffic at aggregate level.

What we do not do

No cookies. Not for analytics, not for advertising, not at all.
No cross-site tracking. No advertising pixels, no third-party scripts, no tag manager.
No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no session recording, no heatmaps.
No account, no login, no newsletter. There is nothing to sign up for.
No selling or sharing of data. There is no data of the kind anyone buys.

The one thing stored on your device

If you dismiss the 18+ notice, your browser stores a single timestamp in local storage under the name ct_age_ack, so the notice does not reappear on every page for a year.

That is a preference you set by clicking a button. It contains no identifier, it is never transmitted to us, and clearing your browser storage removes it. Nothing else on this site writes to your device.

Retention

Individual click and view records are deleted after 90 days.

Daily totals per tool are kept indefinitely, because published figures have to stay reproducible. Those totals contain no visitor values and no location data: they are counts.

Links to other sites

Every tool listed here is somebody else’s service. Once you click through, that vendor’s privacy policy applies and ours does not.

This is why every listing records what the vendor says about retention, training on your content and deletion, with a link to the page we read it from, before you decide to click. We check those descriptions on a schedule and date them, but they describe someone else’s policy and can change without our knowing.

Your rights

Because we hold no data that identifies you, there is generally nothing for us to look up, export or delete on request. If you believe we hold something about you, write to hello@clicktug.com and we will check properly rather than sending you a template.

If a listing concerns you personally, the removal request page is the faster route.

Infrastructure

This site is served by Cloudflare Pages, and the two records described above are stored in a Cloudflare database in Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare processes requests to this site as part of serving it, under their own policies.

We use no other processor. There is no email service provider, no CRM and no advertising platform attached to this site.

Changes

Material changes are announced on this page with a new effective date. This policy describes what the software actually does, so a change here means the software changed.