Privacy policy

What Shed Index collects, what its advertising and analytics partners collect, and how to stop the parts of it you do not want. Last updated 4 September 2026.

Who is responsible

Shed Index is an independent site published by an individual, not a company. For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your own data, write to saurubin@gmail.com.

You can use most of this site without giving us anything

Browsing the comparison tables, the brand pages and the snow load tool requires no account and no personal details. A ZIP code you type into the snow load tool is used to work out which county you are in and is not stored against you or logged as yours.

What we collect

If you create an account

Accounts are optional and exist only for features that need to remember who you are. If you make one we store:

• Your email address, used to verify the account and to send account mail. It is never sold, and never passed to a manufacturer or advertiser.
• A hash of your password. Not the password. We cannot read it, recover it or tell you what it was.
• A verification token while your address is unconfirmed.
• A "remember me" token, if you ask to stay signed in, which expires after 30 days.

Abuse prevention

Sign-in and registration attempts are rate limited so the site cannot be used to guess passwords. That check needs to recognise repeat attempts from the same source, so it stores a keyed hash of the IP address rather than the address itself, and deletes each record as soon as its window expires. We do not keep raw IP addresses in the application.

Server logs

The web server keeps ordinary access and error logs, which by their nature include IP addresses, timestamps and requested URLs. These are operational records used to keep the site running and to investigate faults.

Cookies

Cookies this site sets itself:

• shedindex_session — set only when there is genuinely a session to keep, such as while you are signed in or submitting a form. Anonymous browsing does not set it.
• shedindex_remember — set only if you choose to stay signed in. Expires after 30 days.

Cookies and similar identifiers set by our analytics and advertising partners are described below. You can delete or block cookies in your browser settings at any time; blocking ours will sign you out and stop "remember me" working, and blocking theirs is covered in the opt-out section.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages get read and which links get followed. It sets cookies and sends usage data — including your IP address, which Google uses to derive an approximate location — to Google. We use it to see whether a county page is worth writing; we do not use it to identify individual visitors, and we do not try to.

Advertising

This site shows ads served by Google AdSense. The disclosures below are the ones the programme requires, and they are accurate.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• Third-party vendors and ad networks other than Google may also serve ads on this site and may set their own cookies. We do not control what those vendors collect, and this policy cannot speak for their practices.

How to turn personalised advertising off

• Opt out of personalised Google advertising at google.com/settings/ads.
• Opt out of a larger set of third-party vendors at aboutads.info/choices or optout.networkadvertising.org.
• Read how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Opting out stops ads being personalised. It does not remove advertising from the site.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland

Analytics and advertising cookies are not strictly necessary to run this site, and we ask for your consent before setting them. Where a consent message is shown, your choice is recorded and can be changed at any time through the same message. Cookies needed to keep you signed in are set without consent because you cannot sign in without them.

You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to processing and to withdraw consent. Write to saurubin@gmail.com and say which. Deleting an account deletes the email address, the password hash and any outstanding tokens with it.

Affiliate links

Links to Amazon on this site carry an Associates tracking tag, which is how a purchase is attributed to us. Following one takes you to Amazon, where Amazon's own privacy policy applies and ours stops. We are told about purchases in aggregate; we are not told who you are.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has created an account here, write to us and it will be removed.

How long we keep things

Account records last as long as the account. Remember-me tokens expire after 30 days. Rate-limit records are deleted as their window expires. Server logs are rotated by the host. Analytics and advertising data are retained by Google under its own schedule, not ours.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes with it. It is worth re-reading if you have an account here.