Legal
Privacy policy
Award Rate is a static website with no accounts, no forms, no newsletter and no third-party tracking of any kind. We cannot identify you, and we have built the site so that we could not start without you noticing. The one thing worth reading carefully is what happens when you click through to a card issuer.
Last updated Effective Award Rate
The short version
This policy covers awardrate.com, published by Award Rate of Sacramento, CA. It does not cover the issuers, affiliate networks or loyalty programs we link to, each of which has its own policy and its own practices.
Almost every clause in a standard publisher privacy policy does not apply here, because almost none of the things those clauses describe exist on this site. There is no login, no newsletter, no comment section, no advertising, no personalisation and no analytics. What remains is short, and it is set out below in the order it actually matters.
What we collect when you read a page
Reading a page here involves your browser asking our content delivery network for some files. That request is logged the way every web request on the internet is logged, and nothing else happens.
| Data | Where it lives | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your IP address and browser user-agent string | The content delivery network that serves this site, in its standard request log | Serving the page, and detecting abuse such as scraping or denial-of-service traffic. We do not build profiles from it and it is never joined to anything else. | Rolling 30 days at the CDN, then deleted |
| The page address you requested | The same CDN request log | Aggregate traffic counts and error detection — knowing that a page is returning errors is the only reason we look at this. | Rolling 30 days |
| A theme preference (light or dark) | Your own browser’s local storage, under a single key | So the site does not flash the wrong theme on your next visit. It never leaves your device and is never sent to us. | Until you clear your browser storage |
| Affiliate click details: which card, which module, which page, which list position | Our own click endpoint, when you choose to click an apply link | Reconciling affiliate reports and understanding which formats are useful. Nothing in it describes you — see the section on apply links below. | 24 months in aggregate form |
| Whatever you put in an email to us | Our email provider | Answering you, and keeping a record of a correction or a request. | 24 months, or longer where a correction record makes it useful |
What we deliberately do not collect
- No account, login, password or profile — there is no account system on this site.
- No name, postal address or phone number, unless you put one in an email to us.
- No newsletter, no signup form, no comment system, no user submissions.
- No credit report, credit score, application data or financial account information. Ever, in any form.
- No advertising identifiers, no cross-site tracking, no device fingerprinting.
- No location beyond the country-level inference any web server makes from an IP address.
Cookies and browser storage
We set no cookies. Not functional ones, not analytics ones, not advertising ones. There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to ask you about.
One item is stored in your browser: a single local-storage key holding the word light or dark, written when you use the theme toggle in the header. It is read by your browser before the page paints so the site does not flash the wrong color scheme at you. It is never transmitted anywhere, and clearing your site data removes it. If you never touch the toggle, nothing is stored at all.
Third-party scripts we do not run
This is easier to state as a list of absences, and it is verifiable in about ten seconds: open your browser’s developer tools, look at the network tab, and reload. Every request you see should be to this domain.
- No Google Analytics, and no analytics product of any kind.
- No advertising pixels — no Meta, no TikTok, no Google Ads, no retargeting tags.
- No session recording or heatmap tools.
- No embedded social widgets, comment platforms or share buttons that phone home.
- No content delivery network for fonts or scripts. Both typefaces are served from this domain.
- No consent-management platform, because there is nothing here to consent to.
This is not primarily a privacy decision — it started as a performance one, since third-party scripts are the main reason sites in this category load slowly. But the privacy consequence is real, and it is the reason we can make a short, checkable claim here instead of a long, hedged one.
What happens when you click an apply link
This is the part of the site where tracking genuinely happens, so it gets the most detail. Every apply link on Award Rate routes through a page on our own domain before forwarding you to the issuer or the affiliate network.
What we record
Four things, none of which describes you:
- Which card the click was for.
- Which module produced it — a card tile, a comparison table, a ranked list, the sticky bar on mobile.
- Which page you clicked from.
- Which position in a ranked list, where the click came from one.
Those four values ride in the address of the interstitial page and are sent once to our own click endpoint using the browser’s beacon mechanism, so the record survives the page unloading. There is no identifier in it, no cookie set, and nothing joining one click to another. If our endpoint is unreachable, the beacon is discarded and you are forwarded exactly as normal.
What happens after you leave
You are forwarded to the issuer or to the affiliate network that fulfils the offer. From that moment you are on their site, under their privacy policy, and they behave like any commercial site: the network sets its own tracking cookie on its own domain so it can attribute an approval, and the issuer collects whatever you enter into its application form.
None of that reaches us. We never see your application, your name, your income, your credit file or the issuer’s decision. Affiliate networks report to us in aggregate — counts of approvals and commission totals by card and by period — and there is no mechanism by which we could ask for more, even if we wanted to.
The networks we work with are named on our advertiser disclosure, along with which card is fulfilled by which one. If you would rather not be tracked by any of them, do not use the apply links — every card on this site also links to the issuer’s own rates-and-terms page, which you can navigate to directly.
If you email us
Email is the only way to give us personal information, and only what you choose to put in it. We use it to reply to you and, where you have reported an error, to keep a record of the correction. We do not add you to anything — there is nothing to be added to — and we do not pass your message to any issuer, network or third party.
If you report a correction and ask to be credited by name, that name appears on our public corrections log. That only happens if you ask for it.
Your rights over your data
Where data-protection law applies to you — including the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation — you have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to our processing it, and to receive a copy in a portable form.
In practice the honest answer to most such requests is that we hold nothing, because nothing on this site identifies you. Where we do process data, the lawful basis is legitimate interests: serving and securing the site, and measuring affiliate clicks at a level that cannot identify anyone. Where you have emailed us, the basis is the same, and you can ask us to delete the correspondence at any time.
If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us first — we would rather fix it — and you also have the right to complain to your national data-protection authority.
California privacy rights
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA, California residents have the right to know what personal information is collected, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of those rights.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We never have. There is no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” mechanism on this site because there is no selling or sharing to opt out of, and a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser therefore has nothing to act on here.
The categories of personal information touched at all are limited to internet activity information — IP address, user agent and requested page — held in server logs for a short period, and anything you put in an email. We do not collect sensitive personal information as that term is defined, and we do not use or disclose it for any purpose requiring a notice of the right to limit.
How long anything is kept
Request logs are held by our content delivery network on a rolling 30-day window and then deleted. Aggregate affiliate click counts are kept for 24 months, because reconciling a network’s reporting against our own sometimes requires looking back over a year. Correspondence is kept for 24 months, or longer where it forms part of a published correction record.
Everything this site runs on is hosted in the United States. If you are reading from outside the US, your request is served from the delivery network’s nearest edge location and the log entry ends up there.
Children
Award Rate is written for adults making decisions about credit products and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16, and given what this site does and does not collect, it is difficult to see how we could. If you believe a child has sent us personal information by email, write to us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially — if we ever add analytics, a newsletter, or any form of personalisation — the change will be described here in plain terms with a new effective date, not slipped in as an edit. The current version is effective .
How to contact us about privacy
Write to editors@awardrate.com with “Privacy” in the subject line. Statutory requests are answered within their own legal deadlines; everything else within ten calendar days.