Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-08-01

Data controller

The data controller for besidesguide.com is BesidesGuide LLC, a United States limited liability company. For privacy questions or to exercise the rights described below, email privacy@besidesguide.com.

What we collect

• Behavior events — page views (10% sampled), scroll depth, time on page, and product clicks on comparison pages. Events are sent via navigator.sendBeacon() to our own server — no third-party analytics service receives this data.
• Click events — when you click a retailer Buy button, we log the product, the retailer, and a hashed session identifier. We do not track your purchase.
• Optional feedback — if you submit a feedback form, we keep what you typed and your email if provided.

YouTube Data API Services

We use the YouTube Data API Services to find publicly posted YouTube comments relevant to specific products, so we can display genuine consumer feedback alongside other public sources (like retailer reviews) on our product comparison pages. By using Besides, you are also agreeing to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service.

Google’s Privacy Policy, which explains how Google itself handles data related to YouTube, is available at https://policies.google.com/privacy.

We do not use YouTube/Google sign-in, do not access any private YouTube account data, and do not use YouTube API data for advertising. Comments we display are public at the time we collect them and are shown as originally written (or truncated with a link back to the source video), always attributed to the original commenter. If a comment is later deleted or made private on YouTube, email privacy@besidesguide.com and we will remove it from our site.

How session identification works

We do not use cookies, localStorage, or any persistent browser storage to identify you. Instead, we compute a session_hash: a one-way SHA-256 hash of your IP address, browser user-agent string, and the current UTC date. The hash rotates every day — tomorrow’s session_hash is completely different from today’s. Your raw IP address is never stored in our database.

This means that users who visit the same day from the same network produce the same session_hash, but we cannot reverse the hash to identify an individual. The purpose is aggregate analytics (how many sessions visited a page, click-through rates) — not individual user tracking.

Do-Not-Track

We honor the DNT (Do-Not-Track) browser signal. If your browser has DNT enabled, our behavior beacon does not fire at all — neither client-side nor server-side. You can enable DNT in your browser’s privacy settings.

Data retention

Raw behavior events (page_events) are retained for 90 days, after which the monthly partition is dropped. Aggregated engagement metrics (page_engagement) are retained indefinitely but contain no session-level data — only per-page aggregates (e.g., “this page had 450 views in the last 7 days”).

What we do not collect

• No accounts, no passwords, no personalization profiles.
• No Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or any other Google advertising or tracking product. (We do use the YouTube Data API Services to source public comments — see above — which is a separate, narrowly-scoped relationship with Google, not an advertising or analytics one.)
• No third-party advertising trackers.
• No raw IP addresses in the events database.
• No cross-day session linking (daily hash rotation).

Cookies

Besides uses no advertising cookies and no persistent identity cookies. Functional session state (e.g., admin authentication) uses HttpOnly, SameSite=Strict cookies scoped to the admin subdomain only.

Your rights

Under GDPR (if you are in the EU/UK) and CCPA (if you are a California resident) you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of any data tied to you. Because we store only hashed, non-reversible session identifiers, we cannot link a request to a specific session_hash without additional information you provide. Email privacy@besidesguide.com and we will respond within the statutory window for your jurisdiction.

Copyright takedown

Privacy requests and copyright takedown requests are handled separately. For DMCA takedown of a quoted review or other content, see our DMCA Policy or email takedown@besidesguide.com.