Privacy policy

We study the bots. We try very hard not to study you.

Automated visitors

When a request comes from a bot, we record the time, the page requested (without any query string), the user-agent string, and the network and country the request came from. We look up the network and country from the IP address, use the address to check whether a bot is who it claims to be, and then discard it. IP addresses are not stored. Detailed bot records are deleted after 30 days; daily totals are kept.

Some requests claim to be an ordinary browser but behave like a script. We count those too, but we do not keep their user-agent string, in case a person is behind it.

Human visitors

We do not log your visit. A small script on each page adds one to an anonymous daily page-view total; nothing else is sent. To tell scripts from people, the server briefly keeps an in-memory counter keyed by a scrambled form of your IP address. The scrambling key is random, changes every day, and is never written to disk, so the counter cannot be traced back to you. We set no cookies of our own.

To protect our advertising account from fraud, the server also looks up which network your address belongs to (for example, a home broadband provider or a cloud hosting company) and counts how many ad-bearing pages that scrambled key has loaded recently. Visitors from hosting networks, or who load an unusual number of pages, are shown the site without ads. This happens in memory only and is never stored.

If your browser blocks something on a page, it may send us a security report. We keep only a count of the type of problem and the website the blocked item came from, never the page you were on or anything about you.

Advertising and cookies

This site uses Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this and other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites on the internet. You can turn off personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors' cookies at aboutads.info. How Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are asked for consent, through a Google-certified consent tool, before any advertising cookies are set. You can change your choice at any time from the privacy link the consent tool adds to the page.

Preferences

The day/night setting is stored in your browser's local storage. It never leaves your device.

Fonts and other services

Fonts are served from this site, not from a third party. The network and country lookups use a database stored on our own server; no visitor data is sent to its provider.

Server logs

The web server in front of the site may keep standard access logs, which include IP addresses, for a short time for security and abuse prevention. They are not used for anything else.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it, by writing to keepers@crawlerzoo.com. We will reply within 30 days.