Privacy policy

Who we are

This site is operated by DecoySignal, LLC ("DecoySignal", "we", "us"). You can reach us at service@decoysignal.com or by post at:

DecoySignal, LLC
30 N Gould St Ste R
Sheridan, WY 82801

The short version

We collect as little as possible. We do not sell your information. We do not run advertising trackers on this site.

What we collect

If you email us

We receive your email address and whatever you put in the message. We keep it while we are dealing with your inquiry and delete it from our working systems when we are done. Two honest caveats: a mail provider's backups are outside our direct control and clear on their own schedule, and where you have given us permission to use something, we keep the record of that permission even after the material itself is gone — otherwise we could not show, later, that we were entitled to use it.

If you submit a scam

Submissions reach us by email, so they are first received and stored by our email provider before we ever see them. That is ordinary cloud email infrastructure, and we will not describe it as private. Please do not send account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers, identity documents or unredacted financial records. Leave them out. Do not send them even with parts blacked out — the submission policy explains why, and we will never ask you to email them.

When we select a submission for review, we redact identifying details, move the working copy to restricted local storage, and clear it from the inbox. Redacted material may appear in our videos, on this site, and in content licensed to institutions.

You can ask us to stop using your submission at any time by emailing submit@decoysignal.com. We act within seven days on our own channels. We cannot recall copies already distributed to a licensee or downloaded by a viewer, and we will not pretend otherwise.

If you join the mailing list

We collect your email address and store it with our email provider. We use it to send you what you signed up for. Every email carries an unsubscribe link and our postal address, as US law requires, and we act on an unsubscribe promptly. We do not sell or rent the list. Nothing has been sent yet.

If you buy something

Nothing is for sale yet. When the $9 checklist goes on sale, payment will be handled by a third-party processor, and we will name that processor here and describe exactly what it passes back to us before the first sale rather than after. We are not going to describe a data flow we have not yet built and tested.

Site analytics

This site currently runs no analytics at all. There is no tracking script, no advertising tag, and no cookie set by us. We do not build profiles of visitors and we do not link visits to a person.

We should be precise about what that does not mean. Our web host records ordinary server logs in the normal course of serving a page, and a server log typically records the requesting IP address, the page requested and the time. So it is not true that no record of a visit exists anywhere — only that we do not analyze it, build anything from it, or have a way to attach it to your identity. If we ever add analytics, we will name the provider here, say what it collects and whether it sets anything on your device, and update the date at the foot of this page before it goes live — not afterwards.

Your browser loads nothing from a third-party domain here. Typefaces are served from our own server rather than from Google Fonts. There are no embedded widgets, no social buttons and no advertising code. Our hosting provider is of course a third party and serves every page — that is unavoidable for any website — but nothing on the page reaches out to anyone else while you read it.

What we never do

• Sell, rent or trade your information.
• Share your submission with anyone, other than as a redacted example in our own content, or in institutionally licensed content where you have separately authorized that use.
• Publish your name in connection with a submission unless you specifically ask us to.
• Contact you about anything other than what you contacted us about, or signed up for.

There are three narrow situations where we may have to disclose something anyway, and it would be dishonest to write the list above as though there were not: where the law requires it and we have satisfied ourselves that the demand is valid; where it is necessary to investigate a security incident or abuse of our own systems; and where a service we depend on to do the thing you asked for — sending an email, hosting this site — necessarily handles it. We do not treat any of those as permission to do anything else with your information.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email service@decoysignal.com. We respond within thirty days. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under state privacy laws; DecoySignal is a very small operation and is unlikely to meet the thresholds that make most of those laws apply to it, so rather than claim a compliance status we have not earned, we offer the access, correction and deletion above to everyone who asks, wherever they live.

Children

This site and our content are not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. We do not ask visitors their age, because reading this site requires giving us nothing at all.

Anyone can send an email, though, so we may find out afterwards. If we learn that a message came from a child under 13, we delete their message and their address rather than continue the exchange, and the submission is never published or licensed. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has sent us something, email service@decoysignal.com and we will delete it. We ask that people under 18 do not send submissions at all.

If the business changes hands or closes

If DecoySignal, LLC is ever sold, merged or transferred, submissions and personal information could transfer with it — that is how a business sale works, and it would be misleading to imply otherwise. Any successor would be bound by the permission you actually gave: material you allowed on our own channels only does not become licensable because the owner changed. If instead we simply close, working copies of submissions are deleted; we keep only what we need to show that already-published or already-licensed material was used with permission.

If something goes wrong

We keep the amount of information we hold small deliberately, because the safest data is the data that was never collected. If we discover that information has been exposed, we investigate it, we take advice on what the law requires us to tell people, and we notify those affected where notification is required or where it would help them protect themselves. Wyoming, where the company is registered, imposes its own investigation and notification duties, and we are subject to them.

Our use of Google APIs

We use Google's YouTube Data API to publish and schedule our own videos and to read our own channel's analytics. The only Google account involved is our own. We do not request, receive or store Google account data belonging to visitors, viewers or customers.

Authorisation tokens for that access are held locally on the operator's machine and are not shared. Access can be revoked at any time from the Google account's own permissions page, which immediately ends our ability to use it. DecoySignal's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Third-party platforms

Our videos are published on platforms we do not control, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. What they collect when you watch is governed by their policies, not this one.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Material changes will be noted in the corrections log so there is a record.