Privacy

Serial numbers

When you run a lookup, the decoder executes in your browser. Specifically:

• Nothing is transmitted. The serial number does not leave your device during a lookup. There is no network request carrying it.
• Nothing appears in the URL. Results are not addressable by a link containing a serial, so a shared or logged URL cannot leak one. Result states are also marked as not indexable.
• Nothing is stored. No cookie, no local storage, no server record. Reloading the page clears the result.
• Nothing reaches analytics. Where analytics are enabled, the payload is built from an explicit allow-list containing the manufacturer, appliance type, rule identifier, match status and confidence label. Serial numbers are structurally excluded.
• Nothing is logged. Full serials are never written to server logs.

The correction form is the one exception

Reporting an incorrect result does send data to our server, because we cannot investigate a report otherwise. Even there:

• The serial number is optional. You can submit a useful report without it. The rule identifier and the result we showed are the parts we actually need.
• It is masked before storage. A submitted serial is stored in masked form — the first two and last two characters, with the rest replaced. Enough to recognise a report, not enough to identify an appliance.
• Access is restricted. Correction reports are visible only to site administrators through an authenticated area.
• They are deleted. Reports are retained for up to 24 months from resolution, then removed. Reports that turn out to be spam are deleted immediately.
• Email is optional and used only to follow up on your report. It is not added to any mailing list.

Analytics

If analytics are enabled on this deployment, they record aggregate usage: which pages are viewed, which manufacturers are looked up, and how often lookups succeed or fail. That last figure is what tells us a rule needs attention.

No serial numbers, no model numbers and no personal data are included. Analytics can be disabled entirely by configuration, in which case no analytics requests are made at all.

Cookies

The site sets no tracking or advertising cookies. The core lookup requires no cookies of any kind and works with cookies blocked.

Anti-spam

The correction form is protected by server-side validation, rate limiting and a hidden honeypot field. Where a bot-detection service is configured, its provider will process the request as part of that check. IP addresses are used transiently for rate limiting and are not retained as part of a report.

Your data

If you submitted a correction report and want it removed, contact us with enough detail to identify it — the approximate date and the manufacturer are usually sufficient. We will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects how serial numbers are handled, the change will be described here rather than quietly applied. The commitment that decoding runs in your browser is architectural, and any change to it would be a substantial redesign.