Privacy policies are usually a wall of legalese nobody reads. We’re going to try to keep this one short, honest, and in plain English, so you actually know what happens with your data when you visit racketinsight.com.
If anything here is unclear, just email david@racketinsight.com and we’ll explain.
Who we are
We’re Racket Insight, a small team of table tennis players writing reviews, coaching articles, and buying guides. That’s it. No giant company behind the curtain.
When you leave a comment
Comments on the site are powered by Waline, a self-hosted comment system we run ourselves (so your comments aren’t passed to a third-party comment platform).
When you comment, we keep:
- the name, email, and optional website you fill in
- your comment itself
- your IP address and browser user agent (this is what lets us catch spam bots)
Your comment gets checked by Akismet to filter out spam, and if you’ve set up a Gravatar, the avatar linked to your email will show next to your comment. Gravatar’s own privacy policy is at automattic.com/privacy/.
If you tick the “remember me” box, your name and email get saved in a cookie in your browser for a year so you don’t have to re-type them next time. That cookie lives on your device, not ours.
We don’t run user accounts, logins, or password resets on this site, so there are no account cookies to worry about.
When you browse the site
Two things watch anonymously as you move around:
- Google Analytics — tells us things like which articles are popular, roughly where readers come from, and what device they’re on. We use this to decide what to write next.
- Meta (Facebook) Pixel — helps us measure how our content and ads perform over on Facebook and Instagram.
Both set cookies and will know you visited, though neither is told your name or email by us.
Affiliate links
A lot of the product links on the site are affiliate links via GeniusLink (you’ll see geni.us/... URLs). If you buy something after clicking one, we earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. That’s how we keep all our content free.
GeniusLink uses cookies to route you to the right regional shop (Amazon US vs UK vs Germany, for example) and to track the sale back to us.
Images you upload
If you attach an image to a comment, please be aware that photos from phones can carry hidden location data (EXIF GPS). Anyone who downloads the image can read that data, so strip it before uploading if you’d rather not share where the photo was taken.
Embedded content
Some articles have embedded YouTube videos, Vimeo players, or similar. Those embeds behave exactly like you’d visited the host site directly: the host can set cookies, track you, and link activity to your account there if you’re logged in. That’s on them, not us.
Who sees your data
- Akismet — sees comment data to decide if it’s spam.
- Gravatar — sees a hash of your email to return your avatar.
- Google and Meta — see anonymous browsing events via Analytics and the Pixel.
- GeniusLink — sees clicks on affiliate links.
That’s the full list. We don’t sell your data to anyone, and we won’t share it with anyone else unless we’re legally required to.
How long we keep it
- Comments — kept indefinitely, so we can auto-approve you next time instead of making you wait in the moderation queue.
- Analytics data — retained by Google and Meta according to their own policies.
Your rights
If you’ve commented on the site, you can ask us to:
- send you a copy of the data we hold about you, or
- delete that data entirely.
Just email david@racketinsight.com and we’ll sort it out. (There are a few narrow exceptions, like records we’re legally required to keep, but in practice this covers almost everything.)
Where your data goes
Some of the services we use (Akismet, Google, Meta, GeniusLink) are run from servers outside the UK and EU. By using the site you’re OK with your data being processed in those places under their respective privacy policies.
Questions?
Really, just email david@racketinsight.com. A human will reply.