The short version
- Living Cost Laboratory has no login and no accounts.
- Signing up for the email newsletter is optional, and I don't sell, rent, or share your email address.
- Beyond that, the only data collected is standard, aggregated website analytics.
Analytics
This site uses Google Analytics to understand general traffic patterns — which pages are read, roughly where visitors come from, and what kind of device they use. This data is aggregated and used to improve the site. Google may set cookies as part of this. You can block cookies in your browser settings, or use a tracker-blocking extension, and the site will still work normally.
For more information about how Google collects and processes data, please see Google's Privacy Policy.
Advertising
This site is applying to show advertising through Google AdSense. If and when ads appear, Google and its partners may use cookies — including the DoubleClick cookie — to serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites, including for personalized advertising. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings, or opt out of third-party vendor cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.
These technologies may be used to deliver personalized advertising, measure advertising performance, and improve the relevance of advertisements shown to visitors.
Email newsletter
Most articles have an optional sign-up for a newsletter that lets you know when a new city guide is published. Signing up is handled by EmailOctopus, a third-party email service, which stores your email address to send those updates and processes it under its own privacy policy.
I don't sell, rent, or share your email address, and I don't use it for anything beyond the newsletter itself. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes your address from the list.
What I don't collect
I don't ask for or store names or payment information, because there's nothing on the site that requires them. Beyond the newsletter email address described above, if you email me directly I have whatever you choose to put in that email, and I use it only to reply to you.
Third parties
Beyond Google Analytics, Google AdSense (see Advertising above), EmailOctopus for the newsletter, and standard web hosting, the site doesn't run other third-party tracking. If that changes in the future, this page will be updated to say so before it takes effect.
The homepage's City Roadmap feature — where visitors can vote for which city gets covered next — stores vote counts (which city, how many votes) using Upstash, a third-party database service, so the totals can be shared across every visitor rather than kept per-browser. No name, email, or account is attached to a vote. Your browser separately keeps a small local record of which cities you've already voted for, stored only on your own device, so the same vote can't be submitted twice — that record is never sent to me or to Upstash.
Your Rights
Depending on your location, you may have certain rights regarding personal information that relates to you, including the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of information you have provided.
If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, California, or another jurisdiction that grants privacy rights, you may contact me through the Contact page to make such a request.
Because Living Cost Laboratory collects very little personal information, most visitors can use the site entirely without providing any personally identifiable information.
Changes to this policy
If the site's data practices change, this page will be revised and the "last updated" date above will change with it.
Questions
If you have a question about privacy on this site, you can reach me on the contact page.