Privacy Policy

At Before You Buy, we provide Mac buying guidance and automated recommendations without requiring a visitor account. You do not need to provide your name, email address or payment details to take the quiz. This does not make every interaction anonymous: connection information and browser identifiers can still be personal data.

Quiz answers and recommendations

The quiz asks about multitasking, demanding tasks, use away from a charger, storage habits, long-term preferences and budget. Your selections are sent to our server to calculate and explain a recommendation. This request can begin when you select the final answer, before you press the final results button.

Recommendation requests include a randomly generated session identifier and technical metadata, such as whether the quiz was opened from an article or a landing page. The identifier helps the application handle the result; it is not a name or an account. Some result links can also contain preference values in the URL. Those values may appear in browser history, shared links or infrastructure records, even if the page later removes them from the address bar. Do not include personal or confidential information in a shared result URL.

Technical diagnostics

We send measurements of page loading, responsiveness and visual stability to our own server. We also record operational events for recommendation requests, errors and processing times. These diagnostics help us maintain the service and investigate failures; they do not constitute a separate quiz interaction analytics system.

The structured application logger filters out raw quiz answers, browser session identifiers, raw IP addresses, complete Cookie headers and arbitrary request metadata. It retains permitted operational fields such as request identifiers, product identifiers, route categories, error codes and timing. Technical failure alerts may be sent to Telegram when configured; individual page visits are not sent as Telegram notifications. These application safeguards do not control the separate records kept by infrastructure providers.

Quiz interaction analytics

This release does not include a separate analytics system that collects selected answers, abandonment steps, response times or completion patterns across visits. Answers sent for a recommendation and operational records used to diagnose the service are distinct from such analytics.

Storage on your device

We use sessionStorage for recommendation results during a browser session, and localStorage as a fallback for the latest recommendation, including its session identifier. Local storage can remain after you close the browser and has no automatic expiry in the application. An advertising preference is also saved in localStorage. These records are browser storage, not a visitor account.

You can remove them through your browser's site-data settings. Doing so may clear saved results and cause the preference prompt to appear again. It does not delete records already processed on a server.

Hosting, security and retention

Cloudflare provides hosting and network infrastructure. Delivering and protecting the site involves processing connection information such as IP addresses and request details. Application access limits use a temporary, salted representation of a network address in server memory when a trusted address is available, rather than retaining the raw address in the limiter. Those records expire after the applicable limit window or when the server instance restarts.

Infrastructure logs are separate from application diagnostics. Their retention depends on the services and account settings in use. No online service can guarantee absolute anonymity or security. See Cloudflare's privacy policy for its own practices.

Advertising

This release does not load third-party advertising services. A saved advertising preference may exist in browser storage, but it does not indicate that advertising is enabled. We will update this policy before introducing advertising or additional analytics services.

Retailer links

Affiliate purchase links are disabled in this release. We do not process purchases or receive payment credentials through the quiz. If retailer links are enabled in a future release, we will update the relevant data and commercial disclosures before activation.

Your choices

You can leave the quiz at any time and remove saved recommendations through your browser's site-data settings. Browser settings also let you restrict cookies and other storage. Clearing browser data does not delete records already processed by hosting services; consult the provider's privacy information for its own controls. We will update this policy when the service or its data practices change.