Privacy Policy - RationalSurvivor.com

The short version

If you read nothing else, read this. The detail follows below and controls in case of any conflict.

We do not sell your personal information for money.
You can read every guide on rationalsurvivor.com without giving us your name, your email address or an account.
We collect aggregate analytics about which pages get read and where readers come from, so we know which guides to update.
We collect an email address only when you choose to subscribe, and we use it only to send the newsletter you asked for.
Advertising and affiliate partners may set their own cookies and may receive limited data about your visit. You can refuse non-essential cookies through our consent banner, and we honour Global Privacy Control signals.
We never ask what supplies you store, where you keep them, or what your household’s vulnerabilities are — and you should be wary of any preparedness site that does.
To see, correct, export or delete your data, email privacy@rationalsurvivors.com.

Who we are and who this policy covers

Rational Survivor is an independent publication operating the website rationalsurvivor.com. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR, we act as the data controller for personal data collected through this site, which means we decide what is collected and why, and we are accountable for it.

This policy covers three groups of people:

Readers who visit rationalsurvivor.com, whether or not they interact with anything.
Subscribers to our email newsletter.
Anyone who contacts us, comments on an article, or sends us field notes, test results or corrections.

Where this policy refers to "personal data" or "personal information", we mean information that identifies you or could reasonably be linked to you, including an IP address or a device identifier held in a cookie.

Information you give us directly

We only receive this when you deliberately send it.

Newsletter subscriptions. Your email address, and the date, time and IP address of your confirmation, which we retain as proof that you opted in. We do not require your name, and any name field is optional.
Messages to us. If you email us or use a contact form, we receive your email address, whatever you write, and any attachments you send. People often include more than they need to — if you are describing a medical incident or an insurance dispute, send only the detail relevant to your question.
Comments, where comments are enabled on an article. Your display name, the comment text, the email address you supply (which is not published), and your IP address and browser user agent, which are recorded for spam filtering and moderation. Treat a comment as public and permanent: do not post your address, your travel plans, photographs that show your home’s layout or security, or details of what you keep on hand.
Field reports and corrections. If you send us a photograph, a measurement, a temperature log or a failure report from your own testing, we keep it as part of our editorial record so that we can substantiate what we publish. We will ask before attributing anything to you by name, and "anonymous reader in the Pacific Northwest" is always an option.

We do not ask for and do not want your postal address, date of birth, government identifiers, financial account details or health information. If you send us information of that kind unprompted, we will delete it once the query it relates to is resolved.

Information collected automatically when you visit

Like any website, rationalsurvivor.com cannot serve you a page without receiving certain technical data, and our hosting and content delivery providers process it on our behalf.

Server and security logs: your IP address, the page requested, the date and time, the referring page, and your browser and operating system version. These logs exist to deliver pages, diagnose errors and detect abuse such as scraping or brute-force attempts. They are short-lived and are not used to build a profile of you.
Analytics: a record of which pages were viewed, in what order, for how long, on what broad device type, and which search engine, newsletter or site sent you. Where analytics are used, IP addresses are truncated or otherwise reduced so that we see an approximate region rather than a precise location, and we do not attempt to identify individual readers from analytics data.
Preferences: small pieces of data stored in your browser to remember choices such as your cookie consent selection or your dark-mode preference.

We use analytics for one editorial purpose: to find out which guides people actually rely on, so we know what to retest and rewrite. A guide that gets heavy traffic in storm season gets checked before the next one.

Cookies and similar technologies

Cookies are small files stored by your browser. Similar technologies include local storage, pixels and software development kits used inside embedded content. We group them into four categories.

Strictly necessary. Required for the site to function and to remember your consent choices. These do not need your permission and cannot be switched off from within the site.
Preference. Remember settings such as theme or text size.
Analytics and performance. Measure page views, reading depth and site speed, as described above.
Advertising. Set by advertising partners to control how often an advert is shown, to measure whether an advert led to a visit, and in some configurations to select adverts based on inferred interests.

Third-party advertising cookies are set by the advertising partner, not by us, and are readable by that partner rather than by us. Embedded content such as a video player or a map may also set cookies when you load or play it.

You control non-essential cookies in three ways: through our consent banner, which you can reopen at any time from the footer; through your browser settings, which can block or clear cookies site by site; and through the opt-out tools operated by the advertising industry, including the Digital Advertising Alliance at optout.aboutads.info, the Network Advertising Initiative at optout.networkadvertising.org and Your Online Choices at youronlinechoices.eu. Blocking analytics or advertising cookies does not restrict access to any article on this site.

Advertising, affiliate links and sponsorship

Independent testing costs money, and this site is funded by advertising and affiliate commissions rather than by manufacturers paying for coverage. That funding model has privacy consequences, and here they are.

Display advertising, where we run it, is served by third-party networks. Those networks may set cookies, read cookies they previously set, and receive your IP address, the page you are viewing and your device details in order to select and measure adverts. Depending on your consent and jurisdiction, they may use that data to show you interest-based advertising across other sites.
Affiliate links pass a tracking parameter to the retailer so that a purchase can be credited to us. The retailer then applies its own privacy policy and cookies to your visit. We receive commission reports that show sales volumes and product totals, not the identities of buyers.
Sponsored placements, if any appear, are labelled as such on the page. Our editorial independence policy is set out at rationalsurvivor.com/editorial-policy/, and the commercial relationships behind our links are itemised at rationalsurvivor.com/affiliate-disclosure/.

We do not give advertising or affiliate partners your email address, your newsletter activity or the content of anything you send us.

How we use your information

We use personal data for these purposes and no others.

To deliver the site: serving pages, loading images, keeping the site online and secure.
To send the newsletter you subscribed to, including confirming your subscription and letting you unsubscribe.
To answer your messages and to follow up on corrections, test results and reader questions.
To moderate comments and block spam and abuse.
To understand which guides are read and where readers come from, at an aggregate level, so that we can prioritise updates and retests.
To sell advertising space and to measure whether adverts and affiliate links worked.
To meet legal obligations and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

Under the UK and EU GDPR we rely on the following lawful bases. Consent, for non-essential cookies and for newsletter subscriptions, which you may withdraw at any time. Legitimate interests, for site security, spam prevention, aggregate analytics and answering correspondence — interests we have balanced against your rights, and which are limited to the minimum data needed. Legal obligation, where a law requires us to keep or disclose something.

We do not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you, and we do not build individual reader profiles.

Our newsletter is confirmed opt-in. After you subscribe, you receive an email asking you to confirm; if you do not confirm, the address is deleted from the pending list.

Our email delivery provider records standard engagement metrics such as whether a message was opened and which links were clicked. We use these to judge whether an issue was useful and to remove addresses that have been inactive for a long period, which keeps our sending reputation intact. If you would rather not be measured this way, most email clients can block remote images, which suppresses open tracking.

Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing removes you from the sending list immediately; we keep a suppression record of the address so that a later import cannot accidentally re-subscribe you. We do not rent, sell or swap our subscriber list, and we do not send advertising emails on behalf of third parties.

Third-party services we rely on

Running a website of this size means using service providers. They process data on our documented instructions under contracts that require appropriate security and confidentiality, and they fall into these categories:

Website hosting and content delivery, which process server logs and deliver pages and images.
Web analytics, which processes page-view data.
Email delivery, which stores subscriber addresses and sends newsletters.
Comment hosting and spam filtering, where comments are enabled.
Advertising networks and affiliate networks, which act as independent controllers for the data they collect through their own cookies.
Security and anti-abuse services, which inspect request patterns to block automated attacks.

We review these providers periodically and choose configurations that minimise data collection where a privacy-respecting option exists. For the current list of the providers we use, email privacy@rationalsurvivors.com and we will tell you.

We may also disclose personal data where we are legally required to do so, where it is necessary to investigate a security incident or abuse of the site, or as part of a transfer of the publication to a new owner — in which case this policy continues to apply to data transferred, and we will post notice on the site before any change of control takes effect.

How long we keep data

Retention is deliberate rather than indefinite.

Server and security logs: typically retained for a short operational period, generally no longer than 30 days, unless a specific incident requires us to keep a record for longer.
Analytics data: retained in aggregate; identifiers used to distinguish sessions expire within months rather than years.
Newsletter subscriptions: kept for as long as you remain subscribed. After you unsubscribe, we keep only a suppression record of the address so we do not email you again.
Correspondence: kept while your query is open and for a reasonable period afterwards so we can pick up a thread, then deleted.
Comments: kept for as long as the article is published, unless you ask us to remove yours.
Field reports and test data you send us: kept as part of our editorial evidence file for as long as the guide they support is live, because we must be able to show our working.

Where we no longer need data, we delete it or irreversibly aggregate it.

International data transfers

Our readers are spread across the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, North America and beyond, and some of our service providers are based in, or store data in, countries outside your own — most commonly the United States.

Where personal data is transferred out of the UK or the EEA, we rely on a lawful transfer mechanism: an adequacy decision covering the destination country, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, together with any additional safeguards the circumstances require. You can request details of the mechanism applying to a particular transfer by emailing privacy@rationalsurvivors.com.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you have the following rights over your personal data:

Access: a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
Rectification: correction of data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
Erasure: deletion of your data where we no longer have grounds to keep it.
Restriction: a pause on our processing while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is resolved.
Portability: the data you gave us, in a structured, machine-readable format.
Objection: an objection to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests, including profiling, and an absolute right to object to direct marketing.
Withdrawal of consent: at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before you withdrew it.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@rationalsurvivors.com from the address concerned, or tell us enough for us to locate your data. We respond within one month, and will tell you if we need to extend that period for a complex request. Exercising your rights costs nothing, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.

If you believe we have handled your data badly, please raise it with us first. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk; in the EEA, the data protection authority for your country.

Your rights in California and other US states

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA gives you the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose; to obtain a copy of it; to correct inaccurate information; to delete it; to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising; and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of them.

We do not sell personal information for money, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. Where advertising partners set cookies on this site, the resulting data flow may be treated as "sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising" under California law. You can stop it by declining advertising cookies in our consent banner, by clearing cookies for this site, or by enabling a Global Privacy Control signal in your browser, which we treat as a valid opt-out request.

The categories we collect map to the CCPA’s terms as follows: identifiers (IP address, email address, cookie identifiers); internet and network activity (pages viewed, referring site, interactions with adverts and emails); approximate geolocation derived from IP address at city or region level; and inferences drawn by advertising partners for interest-based advertising. We collect these for the commercial and business purposes described above.

Residents of other US states with comprehensive privacy laws have broadly equivalent rights of access, correction, deletion and opt-out. Use the same address — privacy@rationalsurvivors.com — and we will apply your state’s rules. You may use an authorised agent; we will ask for proof of their authority.

Children's privacy

Preparedness is a family subject, and plenty of our guides are written to be practised with children — fire safety, navigation, a household evacuation drill. The site itself, however, is directed to adults.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, or under 16 where local law sets that threshold, and we do not permit newsletter subscriptions or comments from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, email privacy@rationalsurvivors.com and we will delete it promptly.

If you are a parent introducing a young person to this material, read it with them. Several of the skills covered on this site involve blades, fire, cold water and elevated ground, and our guidance on that is set out at rationalsurvivor.com/disclaimer/.

Security, and what we cannot promise

We serve rationalsurvivor.com over HTTPS, restrict administrative access to the smallest number of accounts that can run the site, require multi-factor authentication on those accounts, and choose providers that hold recognised security certifications.

What we will not claim is that any of this makes a website invulnerable. No online transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information you send us over the internet. That is one reason we collect so little: the safest record of your household’s preparations is the one we never hold. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and, where the law requires it, you directly.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

Browsers vary in what they send, so here is our position. We honour Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information and, where applicable, as a withdrawal of consent to advertising cookies. The older Do Not Track header is not supported consistently across the industry and has no agreed meaning, so we do not rely on it alone — use the consent banner or GPC instead.

Third-party advertising partners set and read their own cookies and operate their own opt-out mechanisms, which are listed in the cookies section above.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our tools, funding model or legal obligations change. The "last updated" date at the top of the page always reflects the current version.

If a change materially affects how we handle your personal data — a new category of collection, a new purpose, or a new class of recipient — we will say so prominently on the site before it takes effect, and where the law requires consent we will ask for it again rather than assume it. Continuing to use rationalsurvivor.com after a change means the updated policy applies to your visit.

How to contact us about your data

For anything in this policy, including access, correction, deletion, portability, objection or a complaint, write to privacy@rationalsurvivors.com. Put the request in the subject line — "data access request", "delete my data" — and it will be routed correctly.

So that we can act on your request quickly, tell us:

What you want us to do.
The email address you used to subscribe, comment or contact us, so we can find the records.
Roughly when you interacted with the site, if you remember.

We may ask one or two questions to confirm you are the person the data relates to. We ask for no more proof than necessary, and we will not use verification details for anything else.

For editorial questions, corrections to a guide, or test data you want to send us, use hello@rationalsurvivors.com or the form at rationalsurvivor.com/contact/. Corrections are welcome and are published on the guide concerned; how we handle them is described at rationalsurvivor.com/editorial-policy/.

Privacy Policy for RationalSurvivor.com