Privacy
What this site collects, what it does not, and what advertising adds.
This page describes what Wealth Signal collects, what it does not, and what advertising adds. It was written by reading the code and checking the running site, not from a template.
What we collect today
Very little of our own. Wealth Signal itself sets no cookies and runs no tag manager and no session tracker. The one third-party script on the site is Google AdSense, on article, guide and lesson pages only; what it sets and why is in the Advertising section below. On every other page — the tools, your desk, the sign-up pages, this page — the cookie jar for this domain is empty, and you can verify that in your browser's developer tools.
Your browser's local storage
A few values are stored in your own browser and never leave it. ws-theme records
whether you chose the light or dark appearance. ws-seen holds the date of your previous
visit, so that a return visit can be counted as one; it is a date, not an identifier, and it is not
sent anywhere — the analytics event that results says only "a reader came back after N days".
ws-tools lists the names of tools you have opened, for the same purpose. Your watchlist
and alerts on the desk page are stored the same way. None of these is a cookie; clearing your
browser data removes them all. For the length of one browser session, sessionStorage
counts pages viewed (so a second page can be counted) and records that the first page was reached
from a search engine or a social network — by the name of the referring site only, never the URL.
The private signal desk, if you have been given access, holds its passphrase in
sessionStorage for that session only; it is never placed in a URL.
Server logs
This site is hosted on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel's infrastructure records requests — IP address, user agent, the page requested, timestamps — to serve pages and to defend against abuse. We do not combine these logs with anything else, and we do not build profiles from them. Vercel's own handling is governed by its privacy policy.
Audience measurement
Vercel Web Analytics is enabled. It is served from this site's own domain rather than a third-party host, and it is designed to be cookieless: it counts page views and referrers without a persistent identifier and without cross-site tracking. It tells us that a page was read. It does not tell us who read it.
Wealth Signal does not collect email addresses. If it ever offers an email edition, this page will say which provider receives addresses, and on what terms, before a single address is collected.
Market data providers
Prices and economic figures are fetched by our servers, not by your browser. Your browser asks Wealth Signal for a number; Wealth Signal asks the provider. The provider therefore sees our server, not you.
- Finnhub — delayed quotes for index and commodity tracking funds.
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) — official daily and monthly series: Treasury yields, the VIX, oil, CPI, payrolls, mortgage rates.
- Coinbase, via FRED — the bitcoin reference rate.
- Upstash — a key-value store. It is used only by the private, passphrase-gated signal desk. It holds one document of market signals. No visitor data is written to it.
API credentials for these services live in server-side environment variables and are never present in any page delivered to your browser.
Advertising
Article, guide and lesson pages carry advertising served by Google AdSense. Tool pages, your desk, the sign-up pages and this page do not. On the pages that do, Google and its certified partners may set cookies or similar identifiers in your browser and use them to select and measure advertisements, which may be personalised where you have not opted out. How Google uses that data is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites; personalised advertising can be turned off at google.com/settings/ads or through aboutads.info. Readers in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are shown a consent message before any advertising cookie is set, as Google requires; declining it leaves the page readable and the ads non-personalised or absent. No advertising data is joined to anything this site holds: any newsletter record, the desk and the analytics events described above stay separate from it. Wealth Signal does not choose which advertisers appear and has no relationship with them; an advertisement is not an endorsement, and never influences what is written.
You can control ad personalisation at any time at Google My Ad Center, and review how Google handles data at its partner sites page.
Your rights
If you are in the EEA or the UK, the GDPR gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection. If you are in California, the CCPA/CPRA gives you rights to know, delete, correct and to opt out of "sale" or "sharing" of personal information.
Wealth Signal does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. In practical terms there is, today, very little to exercise these rights against: we hold no account, no email list and no identifier for you. If you believe we hold something about you, ask at editor@wealthsignalnyc.com, and we will tell you what we have or confirm that we have nothing.
Retention
We keep no reader database, so there is nothing for us to retain. Host logs and analytics aggregates are retained for the period set by the platforms that produce them; we do not export, archive or enrich them.
Children
Wealth Signal is written for adults and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them.
Asking us something
Privacy questions go through the contact page.