Privacy Policy

The short version

Pocket Green Guides is a hydroponics blog. We don't sell your data. We use privacy-respecting analytics to understand which guides are useful, and we show ads through Google AdSense to keep the guides free to read.

One button below switches both analytics and ad personalization off, at any time. The Advertising section covers what Google sets and how to opt out more broadly.

Cookies & analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see anonymous, aggregated traffic: which pages are popular and roughly where visitors come from. We've enabled Google Consent Mode, and what happens by default depends on where you are:

• In the EEA, UK, and Switzerland: analytics cookies are blocked until you accept. On your first visit a banner asks, and nothing is measured unless you choose Accept.
• Everywhere else: anonymous analytics is on by default, and you can opt out whenever you like using the button below.

Your choice is stored in your browser's local storage and applies to every page. It never leaves your device.

When analytics is on, we also store one short record of how you first reached the site (for example "a search engine" or "a Facebook ad"). It is four words and a date, it contains nothing personal, and it expires after 90 days. If you buy or download a guide, that record travels with the link so we know which channel is worth running. Declining analytics turns it off, and the guide links still work exactly the same.

Advertising

We show ads on this site through Google AdSense. Google is a third-party vendor. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a visitor's prior visits to this site and other sites on the web.

Google's advertising cookies, including the DoubleClick cookie set on the doubleclick.net domain, let Google and its partners deliver ads, limit how often you see the same ad, and detect invalid traffic.

Ad cookies follow the same regional rule as analytics. In the EEA, UK, and Switzerland they are denied until you accept the banner, so until then you see only non-personalized ads. Everywhere else they are allowed by default, and you can switch them off any time with the button above.

When you opt out, ads still appear but become non-personalized: they are not targeted using a profile built from your browsing history. Google may still use limited data for frequency capping, fraud prevention, and aggregate reporting.

You can review and change your ad settings, including opting out of personalized advertising across Google's services, at Google Ads Settings. To opt out of third-party vendor cookies more broadly, use aboutads.info/choices or the NAI opt-out tool.

Ad revenue and affiliate commissions are what keep every guide on this site free and free of paywalls.

Hosting

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare may process limited technical data (such as IP addresses) to deliver and secure the site. See Cloudflare's own privacy documentation for details.

Affiliate links

Some articles may include affiliate links (for example to Amazon). If you buy through one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These programs may set their own cookies once you click through to the retailer; that activity is governed by the retailer's privacy policy, not ours. Any affiliate relationship is clearly disclosed on the relevant page.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete personal data, or to object to its processing. Because we only collect anonymized analytics, we usually hold no information that identifies you personally.

Data protection & security

We do not collect or store personally identifiable information on our own servers. Anonymous analytics data is processed by Google Analytics 4 under Google's data processing terms. Cloudflare handles network-level security (DDoS protection, TLS encryption) for all traffic to this site. No passwords, payment details, or sensitive personal data are ever transmitted to or stored by Pocket Green Guides.

Data retention

Google Analytics data is retained for 14 months, after which it is automatically deleted by Google. If you declined analytics cookies, no data about your visit is retained at all. We do not maintain any other databases of visitor information.

Contact

Questions about this policy or data requests? Email us directly at [email protected], or see the contact page.