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 means who you are (your name, date of birth, home address and Social Security number), your work, income and housing, how you would rate your credit, and how to reach you.

While you fill in a form, your answers travel in an encrypted cookie on your own device, scoped to that form, and expire within the hour. Close the tab before you submit and nothing is kept: there was never a copy on our side.

When you submit the personal loan check, we store your answers and send them to Engine by MoneyLion, which asks lenders for offers on your behalf. We keep them only as long as that needs:

• Your Social Security number is deleted as soon as it has been used to find your offers, and within 24 hours at most.
• Your other answers are deleted after 90 days.
• A record of what you agreed to, with your email address, is kept for five years.

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.

Engine by MoneyLion, which receives the answers you submit in a loan check and shares them with the lenders it asks for offers.

When you follow a link to a bank or a lender you leave this site, and their privacy policy applies from that moment. A link from our pages sends 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 an encrypted 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 submitted loan check is kept only for the periods above. 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.