Privacy

We count the pages people open. The count is ours: the page sends a short message to our own server, and our server passes it to Google Analytics. There is no Google tag on this site, and no third-party script watching you read.

That message carries the address of the page, the page you came from, your browser and operating system, your screen size, your language, how long the page was in front of you, and your IP address. Google reads the IP address to place you roughly on a map, and keeps no copy of it.

Why

To learn which pages get read and which get abandoned. We do not use any of it to advertise to you, and this site carries no advertising or retargeting pixels.

Where the site asks you questions — the personal loan check today, other products as we add them — it asks only what is needed to narrow the list: what you want, your circumstances, and a way to reach you. That can include figures as personal as your income.

What happens next depends on what the form is for. A check that only narrows a list keeps nothing: your answers travel in a signed cookie on your own device, scoped to that form, and expire within the hour. Close the tab and come back tomorrow and the form is empty, because there was never a copy on our side.

If a form does more than that — passes your details to a provider, or sets up something we go on running for you — it will say so on the form itself, before you submit it, and this policy will say what we keep and for how long.

While you type an address, the part you have typed goes to Google's address service so it can suggest the rest. Nothing else from the form is sent there.

A small number of companies, each for one job:

• Google Analytics, for the page counts described above.
• Google Places, for address suggestions where a form asks where you live.
• Google Cloud, which runs the servers this site is served from.

When you follow a link to a bank or a lender you leave this site, and their privacy policy applies from that moment. We send them nothing about you. Some of those links earn us a commission — how we make money explains how that works, and why it never moves a ranking.

We set cookies for two purposes, and no others.

• Counting readers — a pair of cookies that lets us tell a returning reader from a new one, and one sitting from the next. They hold a random number rather than anything about you, and none lasts longer than a year.
• Remembering a form — where the site asks you questions, your answers ride in a cookie on your own device so the form remembers them from one step to the next. Each is scoped to the form that set it and expires within the hour.

We set no advertising cookies, and nothing we set can be read by JavaScript running in your browser.

California law gives you the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and not to be treated any differently for asking.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

In practice we hold very little that points at you: the analytics identifier is a random number in a cookie rather than a name, and a form that only narrows a list keeps nothing at all. Write to privacy@theactualbest.com and tell us what you would like; we will answer within 45 days, which is the deadline the law sets.

This site and everything on it are meant for a general adult audience. They are not directed at children under 16, and children under 16 are not permitted to use them.

We do not seek personal information about anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect it. If we learn that we have, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to delete it from our records.

If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 16 who has given us personal information, write to privacy@theactualbest.com and ask us to delete it.