The short version

We collect your email address, the products you ask us to watch, and a record of when you click through to a retailer. We use that to send you alerts and to get paid when you buy something. We don’t sell your data, we don’t run ad trackers, and we don’t follow you around the internet.

The rest of this page is the same thing, said carefully.

What we collect

• Your email address. It’s the only account identifier we have — there are no passwords here. We use it to sign you in with a one-time link and to send you the alerts you asked for.
• What you’re watching. For each want: the product, the target price you set, when you created it, and when it expires. We keep a history of the price evaluations we ran against it, so we can tell you what the price has actually done rather than what a sale badge claims.
• What you typed to find it. Search text you enter at intake, and any Amazon link or ASIN you paste. This gets sent to two services to work out which product you mean — see Who we share data with below.
• Clicks on retailer links. When you click a price or a “Buy on Amazon” button, we create a record: which link, which page it came from, and when. Where you were signed in, that record is attached to your account. This is how we know whether the service is doing anything useful, and it’s the basis of how we get paid.
• Basic technical logs. Our hosting platform records standard request telemetry — IP address, browser type, page requested, timing, errors. It’s operational: keeping the site up, finding bugs, spotting abuse. We don’t build profiles from it.
• Whether you’re on the free or paid plan, and your want limit. Nothing bills today, so there’s no payment data attached to this.

What we don’t collect

• Passwords. We never had one to lose.
• Payment or card details. We don’t take payments.
• Your browsing history. There’s no browser extension and no tracking pixel on anyone else’s site. We see what you do on whatwewant.com and nothing else.
• What you actually bought. Amazon doesn’t tell us. We can see that a click happened and, separately, that commissions were earned — we can’t see your order, your address, or your cart.
• Advertising or analytics trackers. No ad networks, no third-party analytics tags, no data brokers, no social pixels.
• Anything about you we didn’t need to ask for. No name, no phone number, no demographics.

Cookies

We use cookies for three things, all of them functional:

• Signing you in. After you click a magic link, we set a cookie that keeps you signed in for 30 days. Without it you’d have to request a new link on every page.
• Security. Standard anti-forgery cookies that stop other sites from submitting forms on your behalf.
• Connecting your first visit to your account. We set an anonymous identifier when you arrive — a random string, not tied to any name or email — so that if you click a product link before signing up and create an account afterwards, we can connect the two. It lets a referral we earned actually count as ours, and it means your click history doesn’t start blank the moment you sign up. It contains nothing about you, isn’t shared with anyone, and isn’t used to target anything at you.

We don’t use advertising cookies, and we don’t allow anyone else to set cookies on our pages.

How we use your information

• To sign you in.
• To watch the products you asked us to watch, and to send you an alert when we think the price is genuinely worth acting on.
• To tell you honestly what a price has done over the last 90 days, rather than what a discount label claims.
• To earn affiliate commission when you buy through our links — see below.
• To keep the service running, debug it, and understand in aggregate whether it works.
• To contact you about your account or a significant change to the service.

We don’t use your data to train AI models, and the AI service we use is contractually barred from using it to train theirs.

Affiliate links and Amazon

We’re a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Links to products are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission on qualifying purchases. Prices and availability are subject to change.

What this means for your data. When you click one of our links, we route the click through our own site first so we can log it, then send you to Amazon with our affiliate tag and a short reference code attached. That code identifies the click, not you — it’s a number from our own records, with no email address or name in it. Amazon can then tell us that a purchase resulted from that click.

Once you land on Amazon, you’re on Amazon’s site, under Amazon’s privacy policy. We have no visibility into what happens there beyond the commission reporting they give every affiliate.

Why we tell you this up front. We only make money when you buy something we recommended. That’s a real incentive, and the honest response to it is to disclose it everywhere rather than bury it — which is also why we’d rather tell you to wait than tell you to buy.

Who we share data with

We don’t sell your personal information, and we never have. We share it only with the services that make the product work:

• Microsoft Azure — hosting, database, and operational telemetry. Your data lives here.
• Resend — sends our email. They process your email address and the contents of the messages we send you.
• Azure OpenAI — turns what you typed into a product we can look up. Your search text is sent here. It isn’t used to train models and isn’t retained for that purpose.
• Keepa — our source for price history. Search terms and product identifiers are sent here. Your email address is not.
• Amazon — receives your click, our affiliate tag, and the click reference code described above.

We may also disclose information if we’re legally required to, or to protect the service from abuse. If we’re ever acquired, your data would transfer with the business, and we’d tell you before that happened.

How long we keep things

• Your account and email address: until you ask us to delete them.
• Your wants and their price history: while they’re active, and for a period afterwards so the history is still there if you restart a want.
• Click records: we keep these — they’re our record of earned commission and we may need them for accounting.
• Sign-in links: expire 15 minutes after they’re sent.
• Technical logs: retained on a rolling short-term basis by our hosting platform.

If you ask us to delete your account, we’ll remove your email address and your wants. Click records may be retained in a form no longer tied to you.

Your choices

• Stop watching something. Stop any want from your dashboard and we’ll stop sending you alerts about it.
• Stop all email. Email us at privacy@whatwewant.com and we’ll stop everything. We’re building a one-click account-level opt-out; until it’s live, this is the honest instruction. Sign-in links are the one exception — those only ever go out because you just asked for one.
• Get a copy of your data, or have it deleted. Email privacy@whatwewant.com. We’ll respond within 30 days. This applies to everyone, not just people in a jurisdiction that requires it.
• Correct something. Same address.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights — including the right to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We extend all of them to every user. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there’s nothing to opt out of on that front.

Children

WhatWeWant isn’t for children. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us their information, email privacy@whatwewant.com and we’ll delete it.

Security

We use encrypted connections everywhere, store nothing in the way of credentials because there are no passwords, and access our own systems using managed identities rather than shared keys. Data is encrypted at rest by our hosting provider.

That said: this is a small, independent service, not a bank. We hold as little about you as we can get away with, which is the most effective security measure available to us.

Where your data is stored

Our servers are in the United States. If you’re using WhatWeWant from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed there.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page when the service changes, and we’ll update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we’ll email you about it rather than quietly editing the page.

Contact

Questions about any of this: privacy@whatwewant.com

WhatWeWant.com