Privacy policy

This policy explains what happens to information when you use soilsums.com. The short version: the site has no accounts, no database and no server that stores anything about you. The calculators run entirely in your browser. What third parties see is described below.

Who is responsible

SoilSums is an independent website operated by Muzamil Ali. For questions about this policy or about your data, write to hello@soilsums.com.

Information you give us

Only what you choose to put in an email. There are no sign-up forms, no newsletter and no contact form on this site — the contact page is an email address. Mail you send is forwarded through Cloudflare Email Routing to a personal inbox, used to reply to you, and not added to any list or shared with anyone.

Information the calculators handle

The numbers you type into a calculator are processed in your browser and are never sent to us. Two details are worth knowing:

• Your inputs appear in the page address. Tools put your values into the URL so a result can be bookmarked or shared. That means anyone you send the link to can see those numbers, and they may appear in your browser history.
• Some preferences are stored on your own device. Your choice of imperial or metric units, and any garden plan you save in the square foot planner, are kept in your browser’s local storage. That data stays on your device, is not transmitted to us, and is removed if you clear your browser’s site data.

Information collected automatically

The site is served as static files by a hosting provider (Cloudflare Pages). Like any web host, it processes the technical information your browser sends with each request — IP address, user agent, the page requested and the time — to deliver the page and to protect against abuse. We do not maintain our own analytics logs of this.

Advertising and cookies

SoilSums is funded by advertising. When advertising is active on the site, the following applies:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. You can also opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info or the Network Advertising Initiative.
• Opting out does not remove advertising from the site; it means the ads you see are less likely to be based on your browsing history.

Google’s own description of how it handles data from sites that use its services is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland

Where required, a consent message is shown before personalised advertising cookies are set, and you can choose to refuse them or withdraw consent later. Non-personalised ads may still be served, which still requires a cookie for frequency capping and fraud prevention. Your legal bases for our processing are your consent for advertising and analytics cookies, and our legitimate interest in delivering and securing the site for the technical request data described above.

Analytics

If Google Analytics 4 is enabled on this site, it records aggregate usage — which pages are visited, roughly where visitors are in the world, and whether a calculator produced a result — using cookies or similar identifiers. It is used to decide what to build next, not to identify individuals. Google Analytics data is subject to Google’s privacy policy, and you can prevent it entirely with Google’s opt-out browser add-on.

The cookie policy lists what is set, by whom, and what each one does.

What we never do

• Sell or rent personal information.
• Ask for or store payment details — nothing on this site is for sale.
• Send marketing email.
• Keep a server-side record of what you typed into a calculator.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal data held about you, to object to processing, or to withdraw consent. Because this site keeps no user database, in practice the data that exists is: any email you have sent (which you can ask to have deleted at any time), and data held by Google as described above, which you control through the opt-out links in this policy and through your browser settings. To make a request, write to hello@soilsums.com. California residents may also request information about the categories of personal information disclosed for a business purpose; the answer is the advertising and analytics identifiers described above.

Children

This site is written for adult gardeners and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has sent us information, write to the address above and it will be deleted.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Material changes will be noted on this page rather than made quietly.