Privacy
Updated October 17, 2026: the Advertising section was added.
WeldonPC operates this site and is responsible for your data. Contact: legal@lakeerie.info.
What we collect
When you buy or sponsor: your email address (to deliver and send receipts), what you bought and when, and payment details PayPal sends us (we store the payer email only in hashed form). For sponsor listings: the listing text and a private notice email. Corrections: the page and the text you send, without your IP address. For security and abuse limits we store a salted hash of your IP address, never the address itself.
What we don't collect
No tracking cookies, no analytics services, no social widgets. We count page views on our own server without cookies or IP addresses. The only outside script is the adengine.us ad described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total.
Advertising
Pages on this site show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. The banner is separate from the "Nearby" sponsor listings on lighthouse and shipwreck pages.
It sits below the page content on the home page, the lighthouse, shipwreck, fact and chart pages, About, Methodology, Sources, Credits, Help and the data downloads page. It never appears in the shop, on the sponsor pages, checkout, order, download or library pages, Corrections, Terms, Privacy, Sponsor terms, Disclaimer or Accessibility, and it is left out when a page is printed.
To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.
- No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
- How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
- What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
- Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
- Nothing about you is sold or shared.
Cookies
A session cookie keeps forms secure and keeps you signed in to your library. Nothing else; the banner ad sets none.
Payments
Payments are handled by PayPal under its own privacy policy. We never see your card details.
Emails
We email you only about your own orders and listings. There is no newsletter.
How long we keep it
Orders: 7 years, for accounting. PayPal notification logs: about 400 days, with payer details redacted after 18 months. Email logs: 180 days. Corrections: 3 years. Sign-in links expire after 20 minutes.
Your choices
Use "Delete my data" in your library to remove your personal details; we keep an anonymous record of payments. Or write to legal@lakeerie.info.
Children
The shop and sponsor tools are for adults 18 and over. We don't knowingly collect data from children.