What we collect, and what we refuse to do with it.

What we collect

First-party analytics. When you visit, we set two first-party cookies: a pseudonymous visitor ID that persists across visits, and a session ID for the current visit. Against those we record which pages you viewed, which tools you used, and the referring source that brought you here. This is how we know which guides are worth maintaining. It is stored in our own database, not handed to an ad network.

Approximate location and device. Derived from the request — country and region, browser and device type. Your IP address is combined with a secret salt and hashed before anything is stored; we keep the hash so we can count unique visitors and filter bots, and we cannot reverse it back to an address.

Affiliate click records. When you click through to a vendor, we record which platform, which page you clicked from, and which session it belonged to. That row is how a commission gets attributed to us. It contains no name, email, or phone number.

Matcher submissions. The shop profile you enter into the matcher — crew size, job mix, required features, budget — and the recommendation it produced. If you ask for the report by email, we store the email address you gave us so we can send it.

What we never do

• We do not sell or rent personal information. Not to vendors, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
• We do not pass your details to a vendor as a lead. The email you give the matcher is used to send you your own report and nothing else. Several affiliate programs would pay us per lead for exactly that data; we have deliberately left that money on the table, and re-enabling it would require an explicit opt-in you actively choose.
• We do not add you to a marketing list without you asking for one.
• We run no third-party advertising trackers and build no cross-site advertising profiles.

Why we collect it

Analytics tell us which pages answer a real question and which are dead weight, so editorial effort goes where readers actually are. Click records let us attribute the affiliate commissions that fund the work — see the affiliate disclosure for which platforms pay us and which pay us nothing. Matcher submissions let us send you the report you asked for, and in aggregate they tell us which requirements the catalog handles badly.

We collect none of it for advertising, and none of it is combined into a profile that follows you to another site.

Third parties

Our hosting provider serves the site and produces standard request logs and performance metrics. A product-analytics service and, where you have consented, Google Analytics receive pseudonymous product events. A transactional email service delivers the matcher report when you request it. Each processes data on our behalf, under its own security commitments, and none is permitted to use it for its own advertising.

Vendor sites you click through to are not ours. Once you land on a vendor's domain, that vendor's privacy policy and cookies govern what happens next.

Retention and your choices

Analytics events and click records are retained while they remain useful for trend analysis. Matcher submissions are retained so we can re-send a report and improve the engine. You can decline non-essential analytics at any time through the cookie preferences link in the footer, and clearing your cookies resets the pseudonymous IDs entirely.

To ask what is stored against your session or email address, or to have it deleted, email corrections@fieldservicescout.com. We will action deletion requests without requiring you to prove a particular legal basis — see the contact page.

Automated clients and agents

The public API at /docs is unauthenticated and sets no cookies. Requests to it are rate limited by a hashed IP, and nothing about an API call is tied to a person. If you are building an assistant on this data, you do not need to send us anything about your users.