Privacy Policy

Apphowly.com publishes guides about app setup, migration, troubleshooting, privacy settings, account controls, and AI tools. A large part of what we write about is how other companies handle your data, so it would be strange not to be plain about how this site handles it.

This policy explains what information apphowly.com collects, why, and what you can do about it. It covers this website only. It does not cover the apps, services, or websites we write about, each of which has its own privacy practices.

The short version

apphowly.com is a website you read. There are no reader accounts, no newsletter, no payments, no downloads, and no feature anywhere on this site that asks you to connect or sign in to an app account. No guide here requires you to hand over credentials to us, and we never ask for them.

What that leaves is fairly narrow: information you choose to send us, information your browser sends to our server automatically, and cookies used by us and by the advertising partners that keep the site free to read.

Information you give us directly

Contact messages. If you use our Contact Us page, we receive whatever you choose to put in the form, which typically includes your name, your email address, and the content of your message. We use it only to read and reply to what you sent.

Please don’t include passwords, verification codes, recovery keys, or full screenshots of account pages in a message to us. We have no way to act on them, and we’d rather not hold them. If you’re describing a problem, a description of the screen is enough.

Comments. If commenting is open on an article and you leave a comment, we collect the information you enter in the comment form along with your IP address and your browser’s user agent string, which WordPress uses to help detect spam. Your comment and the display name you choose become publicly visible on the page. An anonymised string created from your email address (a hash) may be sent to the Gravatar service to check whether you have a profile picture there; Gravatar’s privacy policy is at automattic.com/privacy.

Information collected automatically

Like nearly all websites, apphowly.com runs on a web server that records standard technical information each time a page is requested. This typically includes your IP address, the date and time of the request, the page or file requested, the referring page, and your browser and operating system details.

These logs are generated by our hosting provider as part of running the site. They’re used to keep the site working, diagnose errors, and identify abuse such as automated scraping or attacks. We don’t use them to build profiles of individual readers.

Cookies and similar technologies

Cookies are small files stored by your browser. Some come from this site, and some come from third parties whose code runs on our pages, mainly advertising.

Cookies set by this website (WordPress defaults):

If you leave a comment, you can choose to save your name, email address, and website in cookies so you don’t have to retype them next time. These last about one year.
Visiting the login page sets a temporary cookie to check whether your browser accepts cookies. It contains no personal data and is discarded when you close the browser.
Logging in sets cookies that store login state and screen display preferences. These apply to site administrators, not to readers, since the site has no reader accounts.

Cookies and identifiers set by third parties: advertising partners, including Google, may set their own cookies or read existing ones when ads load on a page. These are described in the next section, and they are governed by those companies’ privacy policies rather than ours.

Most browsers let you block or delete cookies in their settings. Blocking them won’t stop you reading apphowly.com, though it may affect comment convenience features and will change which ads you see.

Advertising

apphowly.com is free to read and is funded by advertising, currently through Google AdSense.

The disclosures below are the ones Google requires publishers to make:

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or to other websites.
Google’s use of advertising cookies enables Google and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
You can opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
If you have not opted out of third-party ad serving, cookies from other third-party vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads on this site. You can opt out of some third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalised advertising at www.aboutads.info/choices.

More detail about how Google handles data from sites that use its advertising products is published at How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Personalised and non-personalised ads. Personalised ads draw on data about your browsing to choose what to show you. Non-personalised ads are based mainly on the content of the page you’re reading and your rough location, though they still use cookies or similar identifiers for frequency capping, aggregated reporting, and fraud prevention. Which type you see depends on your region, your settings, and, where consent is required, your choice.

Further opt-out tools are available from the Network Advertising Initiative, YourAdChoices, and Your Online Choices for European visitors.

We don’t control which specific ads appear on any given page, and the presence of an ad is not an endorsement by us of the advertiser or what it’s selling.

Visitors in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland

If you’re in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, a consent message is presented before advertising and similar cookies that require consent are used. It lists the advertising partners that may receive your data and lets you accept, refuse, or set your preferences individually.

You can change or withdraw that choice at any time using the privacy or consent settings link provided on the site, and withdrawing consent is as straightforward as giving it.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to request access to your personal data, correction of inaccurate data, deletion, restriction of processing, objection to processing, or a portable copy of data you provided. For data held by this site, such as comments or contact messages, you can make a request through our Contact Us page. For data held by advertising partners, requests generally have to go to those companies directly, since they act as independent controllers of the data they collect.

Privacy choices for visitors in the United States

Several US states, including California, give residents rights to know what personal information is collected about them, to request deletion, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for targeted advertising.

apphowly.com does not sell personal information for money. However, the use of advertising cookies for personalised advertising may be treated as “selling” or “sharing” under some state laws. If you want to limit it, you can use the Google and industry opt-out tools linked in the advertising section above, along with any global privacy control signal your browser supports. You can also contact us using the details at the end of this policy.

Analytics

apphowly.com does not currently use a separate third-party analytics service to track visitors across the site. Beyond the server logs described above and the reporting Google provides to us about ad performance, which is aggregated and does not identify individual readers, we don’t run additional measurement tools. If that changes, this policy will be updated to name the service involved.

How long information is kept

Comments and their metadata are retained indefinitely so that follow-up comments can be recognised and approved automatically rather than being held in a queue each time. Contact messages are kept for as long as needed to deal with the matter raised and for a reasonable period afterwards. Server logs are retained on a short rolling basis according to our hosting provider’s standard practice.

If you have left a comment or sent us a message and want it removed, ask us and we will delete it, unless we are required to keep it.

Security

We use HTTPS across the whole site, keep the software behind it updated, and limit access to the small amount of information the site holds. That said, no website or method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we can’t promise that information sent to us or stored by us will never be accessed by someone who shouldn’t have it. Please bear that in mind when deciding what to put in a message to us.

Children’s privacy

apphowly.com is written for a general adult audience. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided personal information through this site, contact us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page when the way the site works changes, for example if analytics are added or an advertising partner changes. The date at the top shows when it was last revised, and continuing to use the site after an update means the revised policy applies.

Contact

Questions about this policy, requests about your data, and corrections can be sent through our Contact Us page. You can read more about the site and what it publishes on our About Us page.