Privacy

The deal

Childery is free to use. To improve the product, we collect data on how you interact with the website, including pageviews, clicks, scroll depth, session recordings of your interactions with the page (no audio, no webcam, no keystrokes outside form fields you've explicitly entered), and IP-derived approximate geography (city/state level).

That's the trade. If it's not the trade you want, the opt-out link at the bottom of every page disables further collection, and we automatically honor the Global Privacy Control browser signal if your browser sends it.

Who processes the data

We use PostHog as our product analytics and session-replay processor. PostHog stores the events and recordings on its US servers under the terms of its own privacy policy. We don't use your data to retarget you with ads on other sites.

How we use and share data

Childery is free. To keep it free and independent, we may share or sell anonymized aggregate data to third parties — including daycare operators, market researchers, foundations, and policy organizations — in the form of zip-level interest reports or packaged research reports. The aggregated data is summarized by ZIP, state, and time; it does not identify individual users.

We sell aggregate data only to buyers with documented legitimate research, product, or operational use cases. We reserve sole discretion to accept or refuse any sale based on the buyer's stated use, the data being requested, and our own judgment about alignment with the project's mission. Buyers commit, in the Data Use Agreement, to never attempt to re-identify aggregated records, never resell the data, and never use the data against named users.

The structural commitment that defines the product is the no-gating rule: direct daycare contact information — phone, address, website, email where available — is always free, visible, and unconditional on every daycare detail page. No lead arrangement, ad placement, sponsored content, or paid feature can ever gate, hide, behind-a-paywall, behind-a-form, or otherwise degrade your ability to contact a daycare directly. This is the project's hard differentiation against directories that profit by intermediating the parent-daycare relationship.

We also commit, as a hard rule, that our objective ratings of daycares cannot be purchased. Anyone who attempts to buy ranking placement will be refused. The same firewall applies to data products: data sales never influence the rating methodology, never grant operators access to their competitors' data, and never include negative information about a specific daycare.

Lead capture is closed. We do not collect parent contact information on this site for any subsequent purpose — including routing parents to daycares, brokering inquiries, or storing leads for any reason. Parents reach out to daycares using the phone, address, website, and email shown on the listing. We do not intermediate, route, or store those inquiries, with or without parental opt-in. Earlier drafts of this policy reserved a future opt-in lead-capture option; that option has been closed.

Childery does not display advertising. We don't run programmatic ad networks (Mediavine, Raptive, AdThrive, Google AdSense, etc.), direct-sold sponsorships, sponsored content, or any other form of paid placement on the site. There are no ad-related cookies or tracking on the site, and there are no third-party advertising scripts loaded on any page. Earlier drafts of this policy treated ads as a future option that could be added back as long as the placement was additive on top of the free unconditional contact info; that option has been closed too.

We do not currently offer lead-level data sale. The no-gating rule above means that if it is ever added, it must be additive on top of the free unconditional contact info — never a substitute for it, and never a gate in front of it. (Aggregate, anonymized, buyer-vetted data sale remains a reserved upside path; see the section above.)

The full framing — what we sell, what we don't, how the firewall works, and the buyer-vetting discretion we apply — lives in our internal docs/MONETIZATION_DATA.md file in the public repository, and we'll publish a plain-English version on this site before any sale takes place.

Do Not Sell or Share — your opt-out

California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon, and Texas residents have rights to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information under their state privacy laws. To opt out:

• Click the “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link in the footer of any page. It stops further analytics collection and sets a flag your browser carries forward, so any future export of data for sale excludes your events.
• Or email privacy@childery.com and we'll process the request within 45 days.

We honor opt-outs across all states regardless of whether your state's law requires it. We also honor the Global Privacy Control browser signal automatically, so visitors with that turned on never need to find the link.

Categories of personal information we collect

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the categories of personal information we collect are:

• Identifiers — an anonymous user ID generated by PostHog and stored in your browser. We don't collect your name, email address, phone number, or government IDs unless you explicitly submit them through a form (e.g., a corrections submission).
• Internet or other electronic network activity — pageviews, clicks, scroll depth, search queries you type into the site, filters you apply, and session recordings of your interactions with the page.
• Geolocation data — approximate city- and state-level geography derived from your IP address. We do not collect GPS-precise location.

Your rights

• Opt out of further collection — click the “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link in the footer of any page. The opt-out persists across visits in your browser.
• Request deletion of any data already collected about you — email privacy@childery.com and we'll process the request within 45 days.
• Request a copy of the data we have about you — also privacy@childery.com.

Childery is not currently a “business” under CCPA's revenue and data thresholds, but we honor these rights anyway because they're the right thing to honor.

Cookies and similar tech

PostHog stores an anonymous identifier in your browser (cookie + localStorage) so we can stitch your pageviews into a coherent session. The identifier doesn't carry your name or email. You can clear it by clearing site data in your browser, or by clicking the opt-out link above.

Children

Childery is intended for parents, not children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe we have, email privacy@childery.com and we'll delete it.

Changes to this policy

When we materially change what we collect or how we use it, we'll update the “Last updated” date at the top and post a brief note on the corrections page.

Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@childery.com. Legal notices: legal@childery.com. Everything else: contact@childery.com.