Privacy policy

Who is responsible

The PC Radar is operated by Noah Gallagher-Summers, who is the data controller for the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR. For anything in this policy, including a request to exercise the rights below, the contact address is support@thepcradar.com.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies. Not analytics cookies, not preference cookies, not advertising cookies. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. The obligation to ask arises from storing or accessing information on your device, and this site does neither.

Nor is there any local storage, session storage, browser fingerprinting, advertising pixel, or third-party tag. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no tag manager, no A/B testing tool, no chat widget, no embedded fonts fetched from a third party. The typefaces are served from this domain for that reason.

Analytics

Audience measurement uses Umami, an open-source analytics tool running on a server controlled by this site rather than by an analytics vendor. Your visit is not shared with a third party for measurement.

For each page view it records:

• the URL you visited, and the referring URL if you arrived from a link
• a coarse country-level location, derived from your IP address and then discarded
• device type, screen size band, browser and operating system
• a daily-rotating, non-reversible hash used to tell a returning visitor from a new one within a single day

Your IP address is never stored. It is used in memory to derive the country and the daily hash, and is not written to the analytics database. The hash is salted with a value that rotates every 24 hours, so the identifier that represents you today cannot be linked to the one that represents you tomorrow, and neither can be reversed into an IP address. There is no cross-site tracking, no profile, and no way for this site to recognise you as an individual.

Legal basis

The lawful basis for this measurement is legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f) UK/EU GDPR), the interest being an aggregate understanding of which articles are read, so effort goes where it is useful. That interest is balanced against a collection method chosen specifically to be the least intrusive one available: no cookies, no stored IP, no persistent identifier, no profiling.

No personal data is sold, rented, or shared with advertisers, data brokers or any other third party. There is no mailing list and no account system, so there is nothing to leak.

Links to Amazon

This site earns commission on purchases made through its links to Amazon. See the affiliate disclosure for the full explanation. When you follow one of those links you leave this site.

Amazon sets its own cookies on its own domain, under its own privacy policy, not this one. That is how the referral is attributed, and it is outside this site's control. What Amazon collects, how long it keeps it, and what rights you have against Amazon are all governed by Amazon's Privacy Notice. This site receives no personal data back from Amazon — only anonymous, aggregate reports of whether purchases occurred.

Hosting and server logs

The site is served as static files by Cloudflare Pages, and traffic passes through Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare processes request data, including IP addresses, as part of delivering the site and protecting it from attack. This is standard infrastructure logging that any website requires in order to function, and it is not used by this site for analytics or marketing. See Cloudflare's privacy policy for how they handle it.

The analytics server described above runs on a virtual private server and behind the same network.

Your rights

Under the UK and EU GDPR you have the right to access the personal data held about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to processing carried out under legitimate interest, to restrict processing, and to data portability.

In practice, this site holds almost nothing to exercise those rights against: with no cookie, no stored IP address and a hash that rotates daily and cannot be reversed, there is no record that can be identified as yours. That is deliberate. The strongest privacy guarantee is not collecting the data. If you would like to make a request anyway, write to support@thepcradar.com and it will be answered within one month.

If you are not satisfied with the response, you have the right to complain to your data protection authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EU, the supervisory authority for your country.

Children

This site is aimed at adults building and upgrading computers. It does not knowingly collect information from children, and given what it collects, it holds no information from anyone that could identify a child.

Changes

If what this site collects ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. Any change that introduced a cookie or a persistent identifier would also mean adding a consent banner — this policy is written on the assumption that will not happen.