Privacy

The short version

No tracking cookies, no advertising network, and no IP addresses in our database. We store what a listing needs to exist, an email address if you give us one, and counters that are deliberately built so they cannot be traced back to a person.

There is one analytics script, described below. It sets no cookies and follows nobody between sites.

The one analytics script

This site runs Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views so we can see whether anybody is arriving and from where. It is cookieless: it stores nothing on your device and cannot recognise you on any other site. Vercel derives a daily visitor identifier from request data rather than keeping your IP address, and that identifier is discarded when the day rolls over.

It never runs on a sign-in link. That URL carries a one-time credential, and reporting it anywhere — even to a processor — would hand over the key along with the visit. The page view is dropped entirely rather than trimmed, so the token cannot leave this site by that route.

Vercel already hosts this site, so it is a processor we were relying on either way rather than a new company added to the list.

What is public on purpose

Everything in a listing is published: your display name, tagline, link, image and the price you paid. So is the auction that sold it — every bid, what each one was for, and what it finally went for.

That record is permanent. Losing an auction does not remove your bids from it, and neither does asking us to; what a word sold for is the thing everyone else is pricing against, and a market with an editable past is not one you could trust. If you would rather not appear under your own name, use a company name — the display name is yours to choose and nothing checks it against your email.

What you hand over to bid

An email address, and a display name once you have won something. The email is used for three things and nothing else: sending the link that signs you in, telling you when somebody has outbid you, and confirming what you were charged when you win. There is no newsletter, and we do not sell or share the list.

We store those links hashed, which means we cannot read one and cannot tell you what it was. You never need us to: each is good once, expires by itself, and asking for another is one click.

Card details go to Stripe and never reach this site — we see the result of a payment, not the instrument. Stripe keeps what it needs under its own privacy policy.

What we measure

Owners are sold a click count, so clicks have to be counted, and counted in a way that cannot be inflated. Your IP address and browser string are mixed with a secret and a rotating 30-minute time window into a one-way hash. That hash is what gets stored — never the IP itself — and because the window rotates it cannot be used to follow you from one day to the next.

The “N looking at this word” figure works the same way, with one row per visitor overwritten in place and deleted within the hour.

Outbound links carry a utm_source tag so an owner can see our traffic arrive in their own analytics rather than take our number on faith. Where that link goes afterwards is between you and them.

Cookies

One, and only for us: a signed session cookie set when an administrator logs in to review listings. Visitors are set no cookies at all, which is why this site has no consent banner to click through.

Who else touches it

Stripe for payments, Resend for the three emails above, Upstash for the abuse limits, and our hosting and database providers. Your IP is visible to those last ones as it is to any website you visit, and is held briefly in a rate-limit counter so that one person cannot flood the bidding endpoint. It is not logged into the database and not used for anything else. These providers process data in the United States and the European Union.

Asking us to delete something

Write to hello@ownaword.lol and we will remove your email address and blank the personal details on a listing. What we cannot do is rewrite the price history, for the reason above, or unwind a payment record Stripe is required to keep. You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, which is a short list.

Children

This is a paid service for people 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone younger.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that affects what we collect, the change applies going forward, not retroactively to data already gathered under the old version.