Privacy policy

Short version: ClickTug never records your IP address and has no account to sign up for. We use Google Analytics to count visits, and it is denied by default until you accept it, so no analytics cookie is set unless you say yes. Our own click measurement, the thing this site publishes figures from, uses no cookie and no identifier stored on your device at all.

What we collect, and why

ClickTug records two things, and only on listing pages.

A page view. When a listing page is open in a visible browser tab for at least 1.5 seconds. Prerendered and prefetched pages, which your browser may load without you ever seeing them, are excluded.

An outbound click. When you click through from a listing page to the tool it describes.

We record these because the entire point of this site is publishing how many real people choose each tool. Our methodology explains what is counted and what is filtered out.

What is stored with each event

• The tool the event relates to.
• The date and time.
• A pseudonymous visitor value, described below.
• A per-page-load random session value, held only in your browser’s memory and never written to your device.
• Your country, your network operator’s identifier, and whether the browser is a mobile one. All supplied by our infrastructure provider.
• A coarse browser family, for example “firefox”. The full browser identification string is never stored.
• The page the event happened on.

The visitor value

We do not store your IP address anywhere, at any point.

What we store is a truncated one-way hash of your IP address, browser identification string and language preference, combined with a secret salt that changes every day. Three consequences follow, and they are the reason it is built this way:

1. The value cannot be reversed into an IP address without our salt key, which is not stored alongside the data.
2. The same visitor produces a different value tomorrow, so activity cannot be linked across days.
3. The value is meaningless outside our own database.

Its only purposes are to stop the same person’s repeated clicks counting more than once, and to identify automated traffic at aggregate level.

What we do not do

• No advertising or remarketing. No ad pixels, no conversion tags, no audience lists. Google Analytics is present for audience measurement only, and the advertising features it can be configured to use are switched off.
• No session recording. No heatmaps, no scroll maps, no replay of what you did on a page.
• No data brokers, no Facebook pixel, no tag manager container.
• No cookies of our own. ClickTug’s own click measurement sets none. The two that exist come from Google Analytics and are described below.
• No account, no login, no newsletter. There is nothing to sign up for.
• No selling or sharing of data. There is no data of the kind anyone buys.

Google Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service provided by Google Ireland Limited, to understand how many people visit and which pages they read. It runs on every page of this site.

What it does. When a page loads, your browser requests a script from googletagmanager.com and Google Analytics records that a page was viewed. It collects the page address, the page that referred you, approximate location derived from your IP address at city level, and technical details such as browser, operating system, screen size and language. Google states that it does not store your full IP address for Google Analytics 4 properties: the address is used to derive approximate location and is then discarded rather than logged.

The cookies it sets, if you accept. Two, both first party, meaning they are set on clicktug.com and are not readable by other sites. Neither is written unless you choose Accept.

Cookie	Purpose	Expires
_ga	Holds a randomly generated number so a returning browser is counted once rather than twice	2 years
_ga_G-C3KKDC4PX1	Holds session state for this specific property	2 years

Neither contains your name, your email address or anything you typed. The number in them is generated by your browser and means nothing outside Google Analytics.

What it is used for. Aggregate audience measurement only, meaning visit counts, which pages get read and which sources send people here. Google Signals, advertising personalisation and remarketing audiences are switched off, so this data is not used to build an advertising profile of you and is not shared with an advertising product.

It is not the source of our published figures. The click counts this site publishes come from our own measurement, described in the sections above and in full on the methodology page. That system sets no cookie, stores no identifier on your device and never records a raw IP address. Google Analytics tells us how many people arrived. It plays no part in what we report about outbound clicks.

Consent, and what happens before you give it. This site uses Google Consent Mode v2. When you first arrive, analytics storage is set to denied before the Google script is allowed to load, so no analytics cookie is written and no identifier is stored until you choose Accept. That default applies to every visitor in every country, not only where the law requires it.

A bar at the bottom of the page asks once. Accept and Decline are the same size and the same weight, there is nothing pre-ticked, and no part of this site is withheld or degraded whichever you pick. Your choice is stored in your browser under ct_consent and the bar does not return.

If you decline, or before you answer. No cookies are set and nothing identifying you is stored on your device. Google may still receive a signal that a page was viewed, without cookies and without any identifier, which it uses to estimate totals. That signal cannot be tied to you, to a session, or to anything else you did. If you would rather it were not sent at all, a content blocker stops the script loading in the first place, and this site works normally without it.

Advertising signals are always denied. The consent signals covering advertising storage, advertising user data and advertising personalisation are declared as denied permanently and the banner never grants them, because this site runs no advertising and holds no remarketing audiences. Accepting grants analytics storage and nothing else.

Changing your mind. Clear your site data for clicktug.com in your browser settings. That removes ct_consent, and the bar asks again on your next visit.

How to opt out. Any of the following work, and nothing on this site is withheld from you for using them:

• Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser settings.
• Install Google’s official opt-out add-on, which stops the script running on every site.
• Use any content or script blocker. The tag is loaded from a well-known address that every blocker recognises.
• Browse in a private window, which discards the cookies when you close it.

Where the data goes. To Google, who process it as our processor under their own privacy policy and data processing terms. Data may be processed outside the country you are in. We do not sell it, and we have no ability to sell it.

The one thing stored on your device by ClickTug itself

If you dismiss the 18+ notice, your browser stores a single timestamp in local storage under the name ct_age_ack, so the notice does not reappear on every page for a year.

That is a preference you set by clicking a button. It contains no identifier, it is never transmitted to us, and clearing your browser storage removes it. Apart from that and the two Google Analytics cookies described above, nothing on this site writes to your device.

Retention

Individual click and view records are deleted after 90 days.

Daily totals per tool are kept indefinitely, because published figures have to stay reproducible. Those totals contain no visitor values and no location data: they are counts.

Links to other sites

Every tool listed here is somebody else’s service. Once you click through, that vendor’s privacy policy applies and ours does not.

This is why every listing records what the vendor says about retention, training on your content and deletion, with a link to the page we read it from, before you decide to click. We check those descriptions on a schedule and date them, but they describe someone else’s policy and can change without our knowing.

Your rights

Because we hold no data that identifies you, there is generally nothing for us to look up, export or delete on request. If you believe we hold something about you, write to [email protected] and we will check properly rather than sending you a template.

If a listing concerns you personally, the removal request page is the faster route.

Infrastructure

This site is served by Cloudflare Pages, and the two records described above are stored in a Cloudflare database in Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare processes requests to this site as part of serving it, under their own policies.

We use no other processor. There is no email service provider, no CRM and no advertising platform attached to this site.

Changes

Material changes are announced on this page with a new effective date. This policy describes what the software actually does, so a change here means the software changed.