Privacy

We store your email address, your first name, the items you tick off, and — if you write one — the pick you post for other dads to read. We do not sell any of it, we do not advertise to you, and the only thing we count is which pages get read — with no cookie and nothing that names you. Ask us and we will send you everything we hold, or delete it.

That is the short version. The rest of this page is the detail.

Who we are

How to Dadda is Joshua Easter. When this page says "we", that is who it means.

For anything about your data, email privacy@howtodadda.com.

You can read the whole list without an account

Every list page, every item and every pick is public. You do not sign in to read it. An account only exists so you can tick items off your own list and keep them.

What we store when you make an account

Google is the only way to sign in. When you do, Google gives us three things and we save them:

• Your email address. We use it to know which account is yours. We do not send you email — see below.
• Your name, as Google has it. We show the first word of it, and nothing else, if you post a pick.
• A Google account number for you. A long code Google uses to identify you. It means your next sign-in lands on the same account.

We also save the date your account was made and the date it last changed.

We never see or store your Google password. There is no password on this site at all.

What your account holds after that

Your list. For each item on the list, whether you marked it Bought, To buy or Skip this, and when you marked it. Nobody else sees your list.

Dadda's Log. If you use the log, it holds one row per tap: whether it was a feed, a nappy or a sleep, which kind, the time it started and ended, the amount in a bottle, and any note you typed. There is nowhere to upload a photo. Nobody else sees your log. You can delete any single entry, or the whole log at once.

What a community pick makes public

If you post a pick under an item, these things go on a public page where anyone can read them:

• Your first name, with a Dadda in front of it. "Dadda Josh". Not your surname, not your email, not your photo.
• Your own words about why you chose it, up to 500 characters.
• The product, or the name and the link you typed yourself.
• The date you posted it.

Nothing else about you is published. Not your email, not your list, not your log.

A few things worth knowing before you post:

• It goes up straight away. Nobody checks it first. Every pick carries a line saying it is a dad's own words and not checked by us.
• You can change it or delete it, any time. It is your sentence. Delete it and it comes off the page.
• We can take one down. If a pick is spam, abuse, or somebody else's words, we hide it. There is a Report link on every pick so you can tell us.
• Search engines can index it. A public page is a public page. Once Google has crawled it, deleting your pick removes it from our site, and it drops out of Google's results when Google next crawls that page. We cannot make that happen on the day.
• Links you post carry a nofollow ugc tag, so posting one buys you nothing with search engines. That is deliberate — it is what stops this turning into a spam board.
• If you delete your whole account, your picks stay up with your name gone. The words stay for the next dad to read, and nothing on them points at you any more. If you want a pick gone as well, delete the pick first and then the account.

Cookies, and what sits in your browser

One cookie: htd_session. It holds a random code and nothing else — no name, no email. It is how the site knows you are signed in. Our database only keeps a scrambled copy of that code, so even we cannot read your cookie back out of it.

It lasts 12 hours. If you chose stay logged in, it lasts 90 days. Logging out deletes it.

Your browser's own storage. The site remembers small bits of how you had it set up, like whether the sidebar is open. That stays in your browser and is never sent to us.

No other cookies. No advertising cookies. No analytics cookies. No tracking pixels.

One other script: the page counter. Every page loads a small script from Umami, which counts page views. It sets no cookie and it never asks who you are. It is told the page you opened, the page that sent you here, your country, and whether you are on a phone or a computer. There is no advertising script on any page.

Who else can see your data

Three companies, and each only because the site cannot run without them.

• Google, for signing you in. Google knows you signed in to this site, the same way it knows every site you use Google to sign in to. Google's own privacy policy covers that part.
• Amazon Web Services, for the servers and the database. Your data is held in AWS's Sydney region (ap-southeast-2), which is in Australia.
• Umami, for counting page views. Their servers are outside Australia. They get the page address, the country and the kind of device, and nothing that joins it to your account or follows you to another website. If you block scripts, nothing from us breaks.

That is the whole list. No advertising network. No email marketing tool. No data broker.

What we do not do

• We do not sell your data. Not to anyone, for any price.
• We do not advertise to you, and we do not let anyone else advertise to you here.
• We do not email you. There is no newsletter and no mailing list. The site has no way to send you an email, so the only mail you will ever get from us is a reply to one you sent.
• We do not build a profile of you, and we do not track you across other websites.

Some links to shops earn us a commission. That is explained on How we make money. It involves a tag on a link, not anything about you.

Technical logs

Our server keeps a short technical record of each request: which page was asked for, whether it was a read or a write, and whether it worked. It does not record your IP address. There is nothing in those records that names you or points back at your account.

They are there to keep the site up and to spot abuse. We have not set a deletion date for them yet — they sit in the server's own log until the server is replaced. When we set a real retention period, this page will say what it is.

How long we keep things

Your account and your list stay until you ask us to delete them. Your log stays until you delete it.

When you ask us to delete your account, we delete the rows there and then. A copy of them can still sit in a database backup for a while after that, until the backups roll over and overwrite it. We never pull a single row back out of a backup — a backup is only ever used to bring the whole site back after a failure.

Getting a copy, a correction, or deleting the lot

Email privacy@howtodadda.com and say which one you want:

• A copy of everything we hold about you.
• A correction, if something we hold is wrong.
• Delete everything — your account, your list, your log and the record of how you signed in.

We will reply within 30 days. We do not charge for any of it, and we will not ask you why.

When we delete an account, it goes straight away. There is no waiting period and no undo, so be sure before you ask. Any pick you posted stays on the page with your name gone from it — see above.

There is no delete-my-account button on the site yet. Until there is, we do it by hand and we tell you when it is done.

If you only want your log gone, you do not need to email anyone: there is a button for that in the log itself.

Wherever you live

Everything on this page applies to you wherever you are. There is no shorter list for dads outside Australia.

So as well as a copy, a correction or deletion, you can ask us to stop using your data, to limit what we do with it, or to hand it over in a form you can take somewhere else. Same email, same 30 days.

Your data is held in Australia either way — on servers in Sydney. If you are somewhere else, that is still where it goes.

Children

This site is for the adult looking after the baby. An account is for a grown-up, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18.

Dadda's Log holds times and counts about your baby. It is yours, nobody else can see it, and you can delete all of it in one go.

If you think we got this wrong

Email us first — privacy@howtodadda.com — and tell us what happened. A privacy problem matters more to us than anything else on this site, and we would rather hear it from you than read it somewhere else.

If we do not sort it out, Australia's privacy regulator is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, at oaic.gov.au.

When this page changes

The date at the bottom of this page is the day it last changed. If we ever start collecting something new, this page says so before we start.