Privacy policy

Who we are

The Prep Bench (theprepbench.com) is operated by Type 5 Marketing LLC, a company in the United States. For any privacy question, the contact address is info@theprepbench.com.

What we collect

If you use the contact form

The name, email address and message you type. These are sent to our inbox by email so we can reply. We keep the correspondence for as long as it takes to deal with your message, and we do not add you to a mailing list — there is no mailing list.

The form also records the moment the page loaded, and checks a hidden field that a human never fills in. Both exist purely to reject automated spam and neither identifies you.

If you just read the site

We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits, see which pages people read, and see which pages lead to someone clicking a buy button. That last one is the only way we can tell whether the site is working. Google Analytics sets its own cookies and processes data under Google’s terms; we use it with IP anonymization as provided by the platform, and we do not upload any personally identifying information into it.

We do not run advertising networks, retargeting pixels, social widgets, session recording, heatmaps or fingerprinting scripts on this site.

If you click a buy button

A buy button sends you first to a link on our own domain (a /go/ address) and then straight on to the retailer, with our affiliate identifier attached. We use that hop to count how many people clicked. It does not set an advertising cookie of ours.

Once you arrive at the retailer, you are on their site under their privacy policy. Amazon in particular will set its own cookies to attribute a purchase to us. We never see who you are, what you bought, or what you paid — an affiliate report tells us that a sale happened, not who made it. If you would rather not participate, you can visit the retailer directly instead; every product on this site is one you can find yourself.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent personal information to anyone. There is no exception to this.
• We do not build advertising profiles or share data with data brokers.
• We do not run an email list, so we cannot email you unless you emailed us first.
• We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.

Cookies

The only cookies this site itself is responsible for are the ones Google Analytics sets to distinguish one visit from another. Blocking them in your browser, or using an extension that does, will not break anything here — every page works without JavaScript running analytics, including the buy buttons.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, and to object to its processing. Residents of California, and of jurisdictions with comparable laws, additionally have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights — which for us is straightforward, since the site behaves identically either way.

To exercise any of these, email info@theprepbench.com. In practice the only personal data we are likely to hold is an email exchange you started, and we will delete it on request.

Data location and security

The site is hosted in the United States. Contact-form messages are delivered through Microsoft’s email infrastructure and stored in our mailbox. If you are contacting us from outside the United States, your message will be processed there.

We keep the amount of data we hold deliberately small, because the most reliable way to protect information is not to collect it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the “last updated” date at the top will change and the substance of the change will be described here rather than folded in silently.

Related: how we make money, terms of service.