Privacy policy

WhimSale is a marketplace for garage sales, estate sales and private collections in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. Using it means telling us some things about you. This page says exactly what, why, and who else ends up seeing it.

What we collect

Everyone

• Your email address. It is how you sign in and how we send receipts.
• Your name, as you enter it or as Google supplies it.
• Sign-in records. The IP address and browser that requested a sign-in link or started a session. We keep these to spot someone else trying to get into your account.
• What you looked at. Which sales and items you viewed, what you put in a basket, and what you bought. We use this to work out whether the pilot is working, not to build a profile to sell.

If you buy something

• What you bought, what you paid, and when you chose to pick it up.
• The address of the sale you are picking up from: shown to you because you need to find it.
• A record that you picked up, including the pickup code you gave the seller. This is kept as evidence if a payment is later disputed, and we cannot delete it on request while that dispute window is open.

If you sell something

• The address of your sale. We ask you, once for each sale, whether we may publish where it is. Saying yes is permission for two things: an exact pin at the address you gave us, on a public map, and that same street address on the sale page. Nothing is pinned without that yes, and what is published comes off once the last of your hours has passed. Anyone who has bought from you is shown the address whichever way you answered, because that is how they find you.
• Photographs of your items, and any description you write.
• Identity and bank details for payouts: collected by Stripe, not by us. We never see your bank account or your SSN. We store only Stripe’s account reference and whether you are cleared to be paid.

Optional

• A phone number, if you want text messages about pickups.
• A home location, if you want alerts about sales near you.

The photographs you upload go to an AI model

When a seller photographs an item, we send that photograph to Anthropic to draft a title, category, condition and description. The seller reviews and edits everything before it is published. The model never publishes anything on its own.

We send a resized copy, not the original file. Do not photograph documents, prescriptions, or anything else you would not want processed by a third party. Photograph the thing you are selling.

Who else sees your data

We do not sell your data, and this site runs no advertising tracker. There is no pixel here, no advertising script and no cookie belonging to an advertising company: nothing of theirs is loaded into this page at all, and nothing of theirs is on your device. The usage records described above are written by our own server into our own database. Two other companies also see that you were here: Google Analytics counts visits, and Microsoft Clarity records what you do on the page. You can switch both off from Cookie choices at the bottom of any page.

We do advertise, and here is exactly what that sends. We buy advertisements on Facebook, Instagram and Nextdoor to find people with a garage to clear, and to reach towns we are not in yet. If you arrive from one of them and go on to start a sale or publish one, our server tells that company afterwards that it happened. It is sent from us to them, after the fact, and it carries three things: which of those two moments it was, the click identifier their own advertisement put in the link you followed, and your email address put through a one-way scramble they can match against their own records but cannot read back. It does not carry your name, your address, what you listed, what anything sold for, or anything you bought.

The third moment sends less than that. If you arrive from one of those advertisements and ask us to write to you when we reach your town, we tell them that happened too, because otherwise we cannot tell which advertisement was worth buying. That one carries two things and not three: which moment it was, and the click identifier. Your email address is not sent, not even scrambled. You gave it to us to be written to, and the click identifier already says which advertisement to credit, so there is nothing the fingerprint would buy except another copy of you held somewhere else.

We do this to find out which advertisements are worth paying for, and for nothing else. Nobody buys a list of you, and nothing about a purchase or a basket is ever part of it. Switching Telling an advertisement it worked off in Cookie choices stops it, and nothing about the site changes when you do.

We do not advertise to you here, and one of these two is still an exception worth naming. Nothing on this site is chosen for you by an advertiser, and no advertisement is shown to you on it. We have turned off Google’s advertising features, so Google Analytics here is counting and nothing else. Microsoft Clarity is different: loading it also contacts bing.com and sets an identifier Microsoft uses across its own services. That is part of Clarity and we cannot switch it off on your behalf. Switching Clarity off is how you avoid it, and that is what the control at the bottom of the page does.

Where all of this is on by default, and where it is not. The same rule covers both switches, counting and advertising alike. In the United States they are on when you arrive and stay on until you say otherwise. If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom or Switzerland they load only after you say yes, because the law there asks first and so do we. If we cannot tell where you are, you get the stricter of the two. Either way, a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser stops them, and it stops them even if you told us yes before.

What the session recording keeps, and what it does not

Microsoft Clarity replays a visit: which pages, what was clicked, what was scrolled past, how long each part took. It is how we find the place people give up.

Everything you type is masked before it is recorded. Your address, your phone number, a pickup code, anything in any box on any page: the recording shows that a box was filled in, not what was put in it. That is set on the page itself rather than in a setting we could change without telling you, so a new field added later is masked from the day it appears.

If you would rather none of this happened, switch Google and Microsoft off. Nothing loads, and the site works the same. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a no without asking you, and we keep treating it as a no.

What buyers and sellers see about each other

• A seller sees the first name of anyone who buys from them, what they bought, and when they chose to pick up. Not your email, not your phone number, and never your pickup code.
• A buyer sees the sale, and its exact address once the rules above allow it.

Cookies

Five of ours, and some of Google’s and Microsoft’s while those two are switched on. Ours are listed here by name. Switching Google and Microsoft off means theirs are never set at all.

• ws_session: keeps you signed in. Strictly necessary.
• ws_oauth: holds a ten-minute anti-forgery token while you sign in with Google. Strictly necessary.
• ws_consent_v3: remembers both of your answers, one about being remembered and about Google and Microsoft, one about telling an advertisement it worked. Set only once you choose.
• ws_vid: a random value that lets us tell a returning visitor from a new one. It means nothing outside this site, it is never joined to your name or your orders, and it lasts a year. Only set where you have allowed it, and deleted if you say no.
• ws_basket: remembers which basket is yours, so what you put in it is still there when you come back. Strictly necessary: it is the basket, not a measurement of it, so it is set whether or not you allow analytics. It lasts 90 days and holds a random value that means nothing outside this site. If you sign in, the baskets this browser made are linked to your account.
• Google Analytics sets _ga and one more like it; Microsoft Clarity sets _clck, _clsk and a handful belonging to Microsoft. These are the only cookies here that are not ours, they appear only while those two are switched on, and switching them off stops them being set. Advertising adds nothing to this list: leaving Telling an advertisement it worked on sets no cookie of anybody’s, because nothing of Meta’s or Nextdoor’s is loaded into this page to set one.

What your basket tells us

Your basket is stored on our servers rather than only in your browser. That is what lets an item say “2 people have this in their basket”, a count of real baskets, never an estimate and never invented. We never count your own basket back at you, we do not count baskets nobody has touched in two days, and we do not count a basket that already became an order.

We keep a record of what was added and what was taken back out, and we use it to understand what people nearly bought and to improve the site. If you have signed in and left something behind, we may email you about it; every such email has an unsubscribe link, and you can opt out without affecting anything else. We do not sell or share any of this, and it is never used for advertising anywhere off this site.

Clearing your cookies ends the connection between this browser and any basket it made, because the only link is the random value in ws_basket. Nothing about the basket is worked out from your address or your browser.

How we count visits, which is always on

We record what people do on the site, so we can tell whether WhimSale is useful in Kalamazoo. It is first-party and server-side: our own server writes it into our own database, and we do not sell or share it. Signed out, it is not linked to a person at all.

One exception, and it is the honest one. If you arrive by clicking one of our advertisements, the link you followed carries an identifier that Facebook or Nextdoor put there, and we keep it on the record of that arrival. It is on that one row and no other, we do not use it to work out anything about you, and on its own it goes nowhere. It is what lets us tell that company later that their advertisement worked, if you have left that switch on. If you have switched it off, it sits in our database and is never sent.

This is the whole of what is written down. It is a list rather than a paragraph because a list is something you can hold us to.

• Which pages were opened. For a sale or an item, which one, because that is what lets a page say how many people have looked at it. For everything else, the kind of page rather than the address: a seller’s own editing screens are recorded as editing screens.
• How you got here. The site you came from and the page on it, without whatever was in its query string, which is theirs and not ours. Or that you came directly, which is recorded as directly and not as unknown. Any campaign tags in the link. And the code on a printed sale sign, which carries ?s= so we can tell whether signs bring anybody to a sale: it says a sign was scanned, not which sign, or who scanned it.
• What you searched for, as you typed it, and how many results came back. We keep this because a search that returns nothing is somebody telling us what they came for and left without, and that is the most useful thing anybody can tell a new marketplace. It is the one box on this site whose contents we keep, and it is why it is listed on its own line.
• Whether you moved the map, and which filters you used, by name only. That you filtered by price, never the price you chose. That you typed something into the map’s own filter box, never what.
• Whether you are on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and the time. Nothing finer than those three.

Counting has no off switch. Being remembered between visits does. Those are two different things and we would rather separate them than average them into one vague promise.

The counting. To tell one visit from another we work out a short code from the address you connect with and the name your browser gives. We keep only that code, and it cannot be turned back into either. The recipe changes at midnight, so the code we hold for you today and the one we hold tomorrow are different values that do not match each other. This part puts nothing on your device, which is why it is not offered as a choice: there would be nothing to withdraw.

A correction, because the earlier wording claimed more than it should have. This page used to say those two codes “cannot be joined up” and called that a property of the arithmetic. That was too strong, and it was our mistake. The stored codes cannot be joined to each other, which is true and is the part that matters if our database is ever read by somebody who should not have it. But the recipe is ours, so we could work out what your code would have been on an earlier day and look it up. We do not do that. The sentence below is what we do instead, and it asks first.

Being remembered. If you allow it, we set ws_vid: a random value that means nothing outside this site, and lets us tell that somebody coming back next Saturday is the same person who came this Saturday. That is the only way we can find out whether WhimSale is worth returning to, which is the question the whole thing rests on. It lasts a year. Say no and everything above still happens; we simply cannot tell a returning visitor from a new one. In the United States it is on unless you switch it off. In the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland it is off until you say yes. A Global Privacy Control signal is a no, and it deletes it.

What the counting buys is a site that can say “9 people looked at this today” and mean people rather than page loads. What it costs, when you have said no to being remembered, is precision: two people sharing a home connection on the same kind of phone look like one person, and one person who walks outside and drops onto mobile data looks like two. We would rather tell you that than round it off.

And what is not on that list is not kept. Your IP address is not stored: it goes into the day’s code described above and is not written down beside it. What you type into any other box on this site, whether an address, a note to a buyer or a message, is not part of any of this. We do not record where your mouse went or what you nearly clicked. If you want that too, the two paragraphs further down are about Microsoft Clarity, which does, and which you can switch off.

Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity are the part you can switch off, from Cookie choices at the bottom of any page. That is a separate question from the counting above, because it is a separate act: it hands your visit to somebody else, and Clarity records the session. See the two paragraphs above for where they are on by default and where they are not.

Switching them off does not stop us recording your orders, payments and pickups. Those are records of things that happened, not observation, and we are required to keep them. See how long, below.

How long we keep it

• Sign-in links: minutes, then they are dead whether used or not.
• Sessions: until they expire or you sign out.
• Orders, payments and pickup records: seven years. Tax and dispute rules require it.
• Photographs and listings: until you delete the sale.
• Usage records: for the life of the pilot.
• Advertisement click identifiers: on the record of the arrival they came with, for the life of the pilot, like the rest of the usage records.

Your rights

Email us and we will do these things. We do not require you to prove you live anywhere in particular to ask.

• See what we hold. We will send you a copy.
• Correct it. Most of it you can edit yourself.
• Delete it. We will delete your account and your listings. We cannot delete completed transaction records, tax records, or pickup evidence tied to a live dispute. Those we are required to keep, and we will tell you exactly what remains.
• And the one thing we cannot reach into. If a conversion was reported to Meta or Nextdoor before you asked us to delete, that message is in their hands and we cannot recall it. What we sent them is listed above and never includes your name, your address or what you listed. Deleting your account stops any further message about you, and both companies have their own request process for what they already hold. We say this here rather than let “we will tell you exactly what remains” quietly stop being true.
• Stop the messages. Every weekend digest carries an unsubscribe link, and your mail client’s own unsubscribe button works too. Receipts and pickup reminders keep coming while you have a live order. Switching those off would leave you in a driveway without your pickup code.

Children

WhimSale is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from children. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

Changes

If we change this in a way that affects what we do with data we already hold, we will email you before it takes effect rather than quietly changing the date at the top.