Privacy

Who is responsible

Actually Good Tools is operated by DevOpser LLC. For the data described here, DevOpser LLC is the controller.

DevOpser LLC
PO Box 1674
Issaquah, WA 98027
United States
privacy@devopser.io

What we collect, and why

If you vote

A counted vote holds the tool, an optional note you wrote, and one identifier: your account id if you were signed in, or the SHA-256 hash of your email address if you confirmed by code. Your address is not stored in readable form next to a counted vote. Votes cast before email verification existed carry an older, random pseudonym instead; those stay valid.

While a vote is waiting for its code we hold rather more, briefly: the tool, your note, your email address, a hash of the 6-digit code (never the code itself), your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. That row is deleted within 24 hours whether you confirm or not.

If you tick the newsletter box

Your email address, the exact consent wording that was on screen, its version number, the time you ticked the box, the IP address and user-agent at that moment, and a single-use confirmation token. We then send you a confirmation link, and we record the time you opened it. That last one is what makes it a confirmed (double) opt-in — it is our proof you asked, not just our word for it.

Where that link arrives depends on where you ticked the box. Tick it while confirming a vote and the link comes in an email of its own, kept apart from the email carrying your 6-digit vote code. Tick it on the submission form and the link sits at the end of your submission receipt, in a section of its own — one email instead of two, and the receipt says plainly that you are not subscribed until you open it.

Until you open that link you are not on the mailing list: nothing is sent to you, and your address is not passed to the CRM that sends the rundown. Ignore it and the record is deleted automatically after 30 days.

When you do open it, we send you the rundown as it stands that day as your first issue, so a Tuesday sign-up is not six days of silence. That one is sent directly by us over Amazon SES rather than through the CRM, and it carries the same one-click unsubscribe and postal address as every other issue. After it, you are on the ordinary Monday cadence.

If you make an account

Your email address, a hash of your password (or your Google sign-in identifier if you used Google), and your multi-factor settings if you turned them on. Tools you submit are stored with your account against them.

Consent records

Every time consent is granted, withdrawn, or data is erased, we append a row to a log that is never edited and never deleted on withdrawal: the address, what happened, what it was for, the wording and version, the time, the IP address and user-agent. Keeping it is the only way to show later that we had permission at the time.

Ordinary server logs

Our hosting produces standard web-server logs — IP address, the request, the time — used to run and secure the site and nothing else.

Lawful bases

Under Article 6 of the GDPR:

• Consent (Art.6(1)(a)) for the weekly rundown, and only for that. The tick box is the consent; opening the confirmation link we email you is what confirms it. Neither the vote nor its 6-digit code has anything to do with it. You can withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it.
• Legitimate interests (Art.6(1)(f)) for vote integrity and anti-abuse: verifying an address, the vote-identity cookie, rate limits, and the IP address and user-agent recorded on an unconfirmed vote. The interest is a ranking that cannot be stuffed by whoever clears their cookies fastest. The data is minimal, short-lived, and exactly what a voter would expect.
• Contract and legitimate interests (Art.6(1)(b) and (f)) for accounts: creating one, signing you in, keeping it secure, and attributing the tools you submit.
• Legal obligation (Art.6(1)(c)) for the consent log, which exists to demonstrate compliance under Art.7(1).

Confirming a vote never subscribes you to anything. The two are deliberately kept apart, because Art.7(4) does not allow consent to be bundled into something you came here to do.

Cookies

There are two, both strictly necessary, and neither is used for tracking:

• The session cookie — set only once you sign in, so you stay signed in.
• agt_voter — an httpOnly cookie holding either a random token (for older anonymous votes) or a signed binding to the hash of your verified email, so a returning voter is not asked to verify again. It lasts two years.

Both exist only to deliver something you asked for: staying signed in, and one person getting one vote. Neither feeds advertising, analytics or profiling, and no third party can read either. Strictly necessary cookies do not require consent, so this site has no cookie banner and nothing for you to consent to.

Clearing agt_voter simply means you verify by email again. It never earns you a second vote on the same tool — the uniqueness check is on the email hash, not the cookie.

How long we keep it

• Unconfirmed votes: 24 hours at most. A scheduled job purges anything past its expiry, confirmed or not.
• Six-digit codes: 15 minutes, held in memory-store only. The database sees a hash, never the code.
• Unconfirmed newsletter sign-ups: 30 days. The confirmation link itself stops working after 7. If you never open it, a scheduled job deletes the address and its token, because an address that never confirmed never gave us a reason to hold it.
• Mailing-list record: until you unsubscribe. After that the row is kept, marked unsubscribed, so we do not mail you again by accident.
• Consent records: 3 years after consent is withdrawn, as proof the processing was lawful while it lasted.
• Counted votes: for as long as the tool is listed. They are pseudonymous, and you can break the link to yours at any time via your data.
• Accounts: until you ask us to close one.

Who else touches it

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, database and cache. United States.
• Amazon SES — delivery of verification codes, sign-in emails, submission receipts, and the first rundown you get when you confirm.
• DevOpser CRM (crm.devopser.io, run by DevOpser LLC on AWS) — the mailing list and the weekly rundown. It adds the unsubscribe link and our postal address to every broadcast automatically; the first issue, which does not go through it, carries both from us instead.

That is the complete list.

Where the data lives

Everything is hosted in the United States. If you are in the UK or the EEA, your data is transferred there. AWS’s data processing addendum incorporates the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses; the CRM is not a third party at all — it is run by DevOpser LLC on the same infrastructure, under this same policy.

Links out to other sites

Some links to the tools we list are affiliate links: if you sign up after following one, the company pays us a commission. Those links are labelled affiliate link on the page, and the link text is always the tool’s real domain, so you can see the destination before you click. They earn us money; they buy no placement, and the ranking is votes only — the about page sets that out in full.

What this means for your data: an affiliate link is an ordinary link to the company’s own site, carrying a code that tells them we sent you. Following one sends nothing about you to anyone — we do not add an identifier, we do not log the click, and nothing is loaded from the affiliate network while you are on this site. Once you arrive on the other company’s site you are on their site, under their privacy policy, and they will typically set a cookie of their own to remember the referral. Not clicking means none of that happens.

What we never do

• No advertising, and no advertising networks.
• No third-party analytics and no tracking pixels on this site, including none on affiliate links.
• No click tracking of our own — we cannot tell you which links you followed, or that you followed any.
• No profiling and no automated decisions about you.
• No selling of data, and no sharing it for anyone else’s marketing.
• No emails you did not tick a box for.

Your rights, and how to use them

If the GDPR applies to you, you have the right to access your data, to have it rectified, to have it erased, to restrict or object to our processing of it, to portability — a copy in a machine-readable format — and to withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not undo anything we lawfully did before you withdrew it.

• Access and portability: your data → confirm your address → download everything we hold as JSON.
• Erasure: the same page. It deletes your mailing-list record, your notes and any unconfirmed votes, and destroys the link between your address and your counted votes. It is immediate and irreversible.
• Withdraw consent: unsubscribe, or the one-click link in the footer of any rundown. Two steps, same as giving it.
• Rectification, restriction, objection, or anything the self-service pages do not cover: email privacy@devopser.io. We reply within one month.

Those pages ask you for an emailed code first. That is not an obstacle — acting on an address nobody has proved they control would let anyone download or delete a stranger’s data.

Complaints

If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us first at privacy@devopser.io — it is usually the fastest way to fix it.

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In the EEA that is the data-protection authority where you live, where you work, or where the problem happened. In the UK it is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Changes to this page

If what we do with data changes, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it. The consent wording carries its own version number, and we store the exact text you were shown at the moment you ticked the box — so a later rewording can never be applied backwards to you.