Privacy Policy

1. What this policy covers

This policy explains what personal data ThinkOrSpend collects, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it. It applies to the ThinkOrSpend website and account.

It does not cover the retailers we link to. When you click through to a retailer, you are on their site under their privacy policy, and we have no control over what they collect.

2. What we collect

Account data: your email address, a hashed password (we never store your password in readable form), your display name, and your timezone. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and basic profile information from Google instead of a password.

Content you create: your wishlist items, your lists, and any filters or alert preferences you save.

Interaction data: the deals you react to with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and — where personalisation is enabled — the deals you click through to a retailer and the categories you browse.

Operational data: standard server logs and rate-limiting counters needed to keep the service running and to prevent abuse.

We deliberately do not collect a browsing profile from your activity on other websites, and we do not buy personal data about you from anyone.

3. Personalisation and profiling

If you enable personalisation, we build a profile of what you appear to be interested in and use it to reorder the deals you see. The inputs are: your wishlist items, your thumbs up and thumbs down, the deals you click, and the categories you browse most.

What this profile does: it reorders and filters your own view of our catalogue. Deals you thumbed down are removed from it.

What it does not do: it does not change any price, it is not shared with retailers or advertisers, and it is not used to make any decision about you beyond the order of a list of deals.

You can ask why a specific item was shown to you, using the "why am I seeing this" control on the item. You can switch personalisation off at any time in your settings; switching it off restores the ordering every visitor sees and stops the profile being used.

If you are not signed in, we do not build a personalisation profile for you.

Depending on where you are, personalisation may be switched on by default when you first accept our terms. The choice is always shown to you before it takes effect, and you can decline it without losing access to anything.

4. Who we share data with

We do not sell your personal data.

We use a small number of service providers to run ThinkOrSpend, and they process data only on our instructions: our hosting and database provider, our transactional email provider (for verification and deal-alert emails), and an embeddings provider used to compute similarity between products.

The embeddings provider receives product text — titles, brands, categories, keywords — and never receives your identity or your browsing history.

We may disclose data if we are legally required to, or where necessary to investigate abuse of the service.

5. How long we keep it

Account data is kept while your account is open.

Click history used for personalisation is kept for 90 days and then deleted.

When you delete your account, we delete your account and the personal data attached to it — including your wishlist, your reactions, and any personalisation profile — and this cascades automatically in our database rather than relying on a manual process.

Aggregate and anonymised statistics that cannot identify you may be retained after deletion.

6. Your rights and choices

You can access and correct your account details in your settings.

You can turn personalisation on or off at any time, independently of anything else.

You can unsubscribe from deal-alert emails without deleting your account. Account-critical emails, such as email verification and password resets, are not marketing and cannot be unsubscribed from while your account is open.

You can delete your account and the data attached to it at any time from your settings.

If you are in a jurisdiction that grants additional rights over your personal data — such as the right to a copy of it, or to object to particular processing — you can exercise them by contacting us at the address below.

7. Security

Passwords are hashed, never stored in readable form. Access to production data is restricted to the people who operate the service.

No service can promise perfect security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal data, we will act on our legal obligations to notify the relevant people and authorities.

8. Children's data

ThinkOrSpend is not intended for children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. Where a change materially affects how we handle your personal data, we will ask you to review it the next time you use the service, in the same way we do for our terms.

10. Contact us

Questions about this policy, about your data, or requests to exercise any of the rights above can be sent to the contact address listed on the site.