the boring but important bit
Privacy
What this site collects, why it collects it, and how to make it stop. Written in plain language, because a policy nobody can read is not really a disclosure.
Last updated 30 August 2026.
Yard Plotted measures how many people visit and which pages they read. It does not sell anything about you to anybody, it does not run advertising, and it does not build a profile of you. If you never fill in a form, the only things it knows about you are anonymous statistics and which yard shape you clicked on.
Who is asking
Yard Plotted is a one person operation. Questions, corrections, or a request to delete something go to hello@yardplotted.com and I answer them myself, usually the same day.
Visiting the site
Analytics
The site uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which guides get read. That means Google sets cookies in your browser and receives your IP address, your rough location worked out from it, your device and browser, and which pages you looked at.
I use this to answer questions like "is anyone reading the Halloween guides" and "did that change to the corner lot page help". I do not use it to identify individual people, and there is no advertising or remarketing wired to it.
To turn it off, install Google's own opt-out add-on, or use any browser that blocks trackers. The site works exactly the same either way.
Arrivals from AI assistants
If you got here by clicking a link inside an answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or a handful of others, the site writes one line to a file on its own server recording three things: the time, which assistant, and which page you landed on.
That line contains no IP address, no cookie, no session, and not even your browser's user-agent string. There is nothing in it that connects one visit to another or to you, and I could not work out who you are from it if I wanted to. It exists to answer one question that Google Analytics genuinely cannot — whether any of the free articles are actually being cited — and it collects the least that can answer it.
Nothing is written for an ordinary visit from an ordinary search, which is most of them. Crawlers
are recorded the same way, by the crawler's name rather than by its full user-agent header, so no
fingerprint is kept there either. The code is Support\Arrivals if you want to check
that this description is true.
Fonts
Typefaces load from Google Fonts, which means Google's servers see your IP address when a page loads. No cookie is set by the font request itself. This is worth saying out loud because it happens on every page, including this one, whether or not you have blocked analytics.
Affiliate tracking
The site loads a tracking script from Impact, who run the affiliate programs for several of the retailers linked here, including Home Depot. It sets cookies and tells them that a visit happened, so that if you go on to buy something the sale is credited correctly. Impact have their own privacy policy.
This is the one third party here whose job is commercial rather than editorial, so it is worth being plain about: it exists so that the affiliate links work. It is not advertising, it does not follow you around other websites showing you things, and no profile of you is built or sold. Blocking it costs you nothing and only costs me a commission.
Cookies this site sets itself
| Cookie | What it holds | How long |
|---|---|---|
yp_access |
Which access codes you have redeemed, signed so it cannot be forged. It holds code identifiers, never the code itself and nothing about you. | One year |
yp_yard |
Which yard shape you last looked at, so the site stops asking. That is the whole
content: one word, like corner-lot. |
Six months |
Neither is used for advertising and neither follows you to other websites. Clearing your cookies removes both, and the only consequence is that a guide you bought will ask for its code again.
When you give me something
The email list
If you enter your email address to hear when something opens, that address goes to Brevo, who run the mailing list, and is also kept in a file on my own server as a backup. I store your address and nothing else. No name, no tracking pixel, no idea what you clicked.
Every email has an unsubscribe link and one click is all it takes. You can also email me and I will take you off by hand. Brevo have their own privacy policy, which covers what they do with it on their side.
Photos you send in
If you submit a photo of your yard for the gallery, the form asks for your name, your email address, roughly where you are, which yard shape and theme you used, and an optional note. Sending it requires ticking a box that says I can publish the photo.
Along with that, the submission record stores the IP address the photo came from. That is there so that if somebody uploads a photo they do not own, there is a record of where it came from. I would rather tell you that than leave it out.
Uploaded photos are not public. They sit outside the web root where nothing can reach them until I have looked at each one, and I skip anything showing house numbers, faces or number plates rather than editing somebody's photo. If a photo is published, only the photo and the first name appear. The email address and IP never do.
Changed your mind? Email me and I will delete the photo and the record, published or not.
Links to stores
Product links go through this site and then bounce you to the retailer. When that happens I log
the date, which product it was, the retailer, and the path of the page you clicked
from, such as /guides/corner-lot/north-pole. Never the full address, never a
query string, and nothing that identifies you. It tells me which guides are actually useful.
Once you land on Amazon, Home Depot or anywhere else, you are on their site under their rules, and they will set their own cookies. That is how the affiliate commission is tracked, and it is also entirely out of my hands.
Stopping abuse
Forms are rate limited so one person cannot flood them. To count submissions per person per day without keeping a list of who visited, the site stores a one-way hash of your IP address combined with today's date. The address itself is not written down, the hash cannot be reversed into one, and it is meaningless the next day.
What I do not do
- No advertising and no remarketing. The affiliate tracker above is the only commercial script here, and it exists to credit a sale rather than to show you anything.
- Nothing about you is sold or handed to a data broker.
- No account, no password, no purchase history. Buying a guide gives you a code, and the code does not know who redeemed it.
- No payment details ever touch this site. Etsy handles all of that and I never see a card number.
How long things are kept
| Thing | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Analytics | Whatever Google's retention setting says, currently their default |
| Email address | Until you unsubscribe or ask me to delete it |
| Photo submissions | Until you ask me to delete them |
| Outbound click log | Rolling, and it contains nothing that identifies you anyway |
| Arrivals log | Rolling. Time, which assistant, which page — and nothing else |
| Rate limit hashes | One day |
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have a legal right to see what is held about you, correct it, or have it deleted. I would honour all of those regardless of where you live, because the amount of data involved is small enough that there is no reason not to.
Email hello@yardplotted.com and say what you want. There is no form and no process.
Children
This site is for people who own a lawn and a staple gun. It is not aimed at children and I do not knowingly collect anything from anybody under 13. If you think I have, tell me and I will delete it.
When this changes
The date at the top moves when the page changes. If something meaningful changes, like a new third party seeing your data, I will say so on the page rather than quietly editing a line.
This policy describes a small site run by one person. It is written to be accurate rather than to be exhaustive, and it is not legal advice. If you are reading it as a template for your own site, get somebody qualified to look at yours.