Privacy at tos.watch
Last updated: October 30, 2026
tos.watch is a free newsletter that tells you when a company changes its terms or privacy policy. It's run by Matthew Hendricks, a sole proprietorship in Washington State, USA. Contact: hello@tos.watch.
We watch what other companies do with your data, so here's exactly what we do with yours.
What we collect
- Your email address, when you subscribe, vote for a feature, or give an email with a service request.
- The page you signed up on, and its topic. The page is the home page or a service's page. The topic is that page's category, for example Dating apps. You don't pick a topic: the page sets it, and the home page sets none. Both are saved as tags on your record at Buttondown.
- What you asked us to track, if you use the request box. We store the service name or link you typed, as an anonymous count that isn't tied to any email. If you also gave an email, your Buttondown record gets a tag naming the service (or a simplified form of the link).
- Feature votes. We count each vote per feature, with no email attached. If you gave an email, your Buttondown record gets a tag for that vote.
If you vote or request something with an email we don't have yet, Buttondown sends you a confirmation email, and confirming also subscribes you to alerts.
tos.watch sets no cookies and runs no advertising or tracking scripts, and our fonts are hosted by us. We do count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless. It records which pages are viewed, the site that sent the visitor, and the country, browser and device type. It is run by Cloudflare, the company that hosts the site.
Who else handles it
- Buttondown stores our subscriber list and sends the newsletter and the confirmation email. It receives your email address, the tags above, and your IP address, which it uses to block spam signups. See Buttondown's privacy policy.
- Stripe handles payments if you choose to give from the support page. You enter your card details on Stripe's page, not ours, and we never see them. Stripe tells us the amount and the name or email you give it. See Stripe's privacy policy.
- Cloudflare hosts the site and our signup service. Like any host, it processes your IP address and basic request details to deliver pages and stop abuse. Our signup service also keeps your IP address in memory for about a minute to limit repeated signups; it is never written to a database or file. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.
We don't sell, rent or share your email with anyone else, and we don't use it for anything but tos.watch.
Buttondown and the email services that deliver or display our emails may record whether an email was opened and which links were clicked, under their own settings and policies.
How long we keep it
Your email address is kept only at Buttondown, until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. The page you signed up on, its topic, votes and requests are tags on that one record, so deleting it removes them too. Buttondown keeps a record that an address unsubscribed, so it doesn't email you again unless you ask. Our own database and logs don't hold your email address. The counts of requested services and voted features stay, because they contain nothing about you.
Your choices
- Every email has an unsubscribe link.
- Write to hello@tos.watch to see, correct or delete what we hold about you. We'll answer within 30 days.
- If you're in the EU or UK, we rely on your consent to email you, and you can withdraw it any time by unsubscribing. You can also complain to your data protection authority.
Children
tos.watch isn't meant for children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their email addresses.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that affects you, we'll say so in the newsletter. The code that runs the site is open source. See also the terms of use.