This page explains what personal information Titanium Field Guide ("TFG," "we," "our," or "us") collects through titaniumfieldguide.com (the "Site"), what we do with it, who else handles it, and how to have it corrected or deleted.
The guide is free to read and is supported by advertising. Our own code sets no cookies and builds no profile of you. We ask for your email address only when you want something back from us, such as the monthly letter or a reply about a watch you suggested, and we do not sell it or give it to anyone for marketing, advertisers and watch brands included.
The Titanium Field Guide is an independent reference publication. We decide how the personal information described here is used, which makes us its "controller" under data protection law. The domains ceramicfieldguide.com, bronzefieldguide.com and wristwatchfieldguide.com redirect to this Site and are covered by this policy too.
You can reach us about anything in this policy at tifg@titaniumfieldguide.com.
Hosting. The Site and its images are served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare receives your IP address and the details your browser sends with each request (such as its type and language), so that it can deliver pages and protect the Site from attacks and abuse.
Visitor counts. We use two privacy-focused analytics tools, Cloudflare Web Analytics and Fathom Analytics, to understand how many people read the guide and which pages they use. Neither sets cookies or stores anything in your browser. Cloudflare states that its analytics does not fingerprint visitors. Fathom counts unique visitors with a one-way code made from your IP address, your browser details, the site and a value that changes every day, so the same visitor cannot be recognised from one day to the next, and its ordinary records do not keep your IP address. What we see is totals: page views, the sites that sent visitors, and country, browser and device type in aggregate.
Filter usage. When you use the filters on a collection page, the page sends us an anonymous note of which filter you used and how many watches it showed. It carries no IP address, cookie or identifier, and we use it only to learn which filters readers find useful.
Links to other sites. The guide links to watch makers, retailers and publications. Once you follow a link, that site's own privacy policy applies.
The Site's own code sets no cookies, and section 10 covers advertising. Two of our features keep a small note in your browser's local storage, on your own device:
tfg_compare remembers the watches you added to the comparison panel. It never leaves your device.tfg-voter is a random code created when you open a monthly picks page. It is sent to us when you vote or view the standings, so that each browser gets one vote. It contains nothing about you.You can delete either at any time by clearing this Site's data in your browser settings.
Spam protection. Our forms and the readers' vote use Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from bots. To run the check, Cloudflare processes your IP address and technical signals from your browser, and its Turnstile privacy addendum says those signals are not used to identify, profile or target individuals.
Do Not Track. The Do Not Track signal has no agreed meaning, and the Site does not change its behaviour when your browser sends one.
If you subscribe, we store your email address, the date you signed up, which page you signed up from and whether you have confirmed. Nothing is sent to you beyond a single confirmation email until you click the link in it.
The letter is sent through Resend, an email delivery service. Every letter carries a one-click unsubscribe link. When you unsubscribe we keep your address marked as unsubscribed so that it is never mailed again by mistake; if you would rather we delete it entirely, email us and we will.
What we collect. When you use the suggestion form or the contribution form, we keep what you enter: the watch details, any photographs you upload, your review if you write one, and your name and email address (required for photos, reviews and brand submissions, optional for suggestions). With each submission we also record the time it arrived and the IP address, country and browser it came from, which we use to deal with spam and abuse. We delete the IP address and browser details once the submission has been dealt with.
Who sees it. Submissions are stored in a private storage bucket on Cloudflare that only the editor can open, and the editor receives an email notification of each one. Part of the review is done with the help of an AI assistant, Anthropic's Claude, which reads the submission, including your name and email address if you gave them, so it can check the watch against the maker's own website. The assistant is never given your IP address. If you gave an email address, we use it to tell you what happened to your submission and, if needed, to ask you a question about it, and for nothing else.
What gets published. If we publish your contribution, the public parts are the photograph or review itself and the name you gave us as its credit. A suggestion that becomes a listing may carry a "suggested by" credit with the name you gave. Your email address is never published. Before a photograph is published we remove the location data a camera or phone embeds in the file; the original stays in the private inbox.
Taking it down. You can ask us to remove your published contribution or your credit at any time, and we will take it down from the Site. Copies that others have already made, or that search engines cached, may take longer to disappear. The contribution terms set out the licence you give us for photographs and reviews.
When you vote on a monthly picks page, we store your choice against a scrambled (hashed) form of your browser's tfg-voter code, so you can change your vote and cannot vote twice. We also store a scrambled form of your IP address, combined with the month and a secret value, so that one connection cannot cast more than ten votes. We do not store the IP address itself, and a vote is never linked to your name or email address. The records are kept as the record of that month's result.
If you email us, including through a report-an-error link, we keep the message and your address so that we can reply and keep a record of the correspondence. Mail sent to the address we use for press releases and brand newsletters is archived in private storage on Cloudflare.
For readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the legal bases we rely on are:
We use a small number of service providers, each of which handles personal information only to provide its service to us:
We never sell your email address or anything you send us, and we never give either to advertisers. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or where it is needed to protect the Site, its readers or the rights of others.
The guide is supported by advertising, and ads may appear on its pages. Advertisers have no say over which watches the guide lists or what a listing says. Before we use any advertising that sets cookies or collects information about readers, we will update this policy to name the company that provides it and say what it collects, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent first.
Our service providers are based in the United States and may process information there and in other countries. Where information about readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland is transferred, we rely on the safeguards those providers offer, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
Wherever you live, you can email us to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it, and we will do so unless the law requires us to keep it. You can unsubscribe from the letter with the link in any issue.
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you also have the right to restrict or object to our use of your information, to receive it in a portable form, and to complain to your local data protection authority. If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have the right to know what we collect and how we use it, to correct and delete it, and not to be treated differently for using these rights. We do not currently sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of. If that changes, this policy will say so and explain how to opt out before it happens.
We answer requests within one month. To protect you, we may ask you to confirm the request from the email address it concerns before we act on it.
The Site is written for adults and is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has sent us their details, tell us and we will delete them.
When we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date. If a change affects how we use information we already hold, we will say so at the top of this page and, for subscribers, in the next monthly letter.
Questions, requests and complaints about privacy may be directed to:
The Titanium Field Guide
tifg@titaniumfieldguide.com
titaniumfieldguide.com