We hold nothing about you.
There is no account to make, no form to fill in, no newsletter and no database of visitors. MetaAIMac.com stores nothing about the people who read it. What it does do is load two Google services on every page — Analytics and AdSense — and those collect data under Google’s terms, not ours. This page names every one of them, and you can check it against the page source.
Written in plain English rather than boilerplate. It describes this website only — not Meta’s apps, which have their own privacy story.
Three buckets, and the first one is empty
Most privacy policies open with a long list of things a site may collect, which tells you nothing about what it actually does. Here is the real division for this site.
What we collect ourselves
Nothing. The site is static pages with no server-side logic of ours, no database, no analytics of our own and no first-party cookies. Our JavaScript opens menus, reveals diagrams and prints the year.
Held by us: no records at allGoogle Analytics
Measures which pages get read and roughly where readers come from: pages viewed, referring site, approximate location, device and browser. Google states that IP addresses are not stored in Analytics 4 and that this cannot be switched back on.
Retention: 2 or 14 months, Google’s maximumGoogle AdSense
Pays for the site by showing ads. It sets cookies to measure impressions, cap repetition and detect fraud, and — where it is permitted to — to select ads based on browsing across other sites. This is the one that does real tracking.
Cookies: up to 13 months eachTwo consequences follow from that first bucket being empty, and they cut in opposite directions. The good one is that there is no store of reader data here to leak, sell, subpoena or lose. The awkward one is in your rights below: we cannot show you your data because we have no way to know which data is yours.
Our web host necessarily processes requests in order to serve pages, and hosts typically keep short-lived server logs containing IP addresses for security and diagnostics. That is standard infrastructure rather than something we analyse, and we do not build reports from it.
There is no cookie banner here, and that is a gap
A policy that describes consent it does not collect would be a false statement in a document whose whole purpose is accuracy. So: the scripts above load the moment a page opens, and nobody is asked first.
Under the EU and UK ePrivacy rules, non-essential cookies — which analytics and advertising cookies are — are supposed to be set only after the reader agrees. This site does not ask. The Analytics tag and the AdSense tag are both in the page head, and they run on load.
Stated plainly: if you are in the EU or UK, cookies were set before you reached this sentence, and you were not given the choice first.
There is a second layer to this, which works slightly in your favour. Since January 2024 Google has required publishers serving ads to readers in the EEA and the UK to use a Google-certified consent platform in order to show personalised ads, with Switzerland added from July 2024. Traffic without one is eligible only for non-personalised or limited ads. Because this site has no such platform, Google’s own enforcement should mean EEA, UK and Swiss readers are not being profiled for ad targeting here — though cookies for measurement, frequency capping and fraud detection are still set, and those still require consent that we are not collecting.
A consent tool is the fix, and it is the outstanding item on this site’s list. Until it is in place this section stays here saying so, and the controls below are what you have in the meantime.
What this means for you, concretely
If you did not want analytics and advertising cookies from this site, you did not get the chance to decline them before they were set. You can remove them now — clearing site data for metaaimac.com deletes the first-party ones, and the controls below stop them coming back.
Saying this in public is uncomfortable, and it is the only version compatible with the editorial rules the rest of this site is written under. A privacy policy is the last place to start describing intentions as though they were practices.
Block the cookies in your browser
Blocking third-party cookies, or using a content blocker, stops most of this at source and needs nothing from us. Safari and Firefox block much of it by default already.
Google’s Analytics opt-out add-on
Google publishes a browser extension that stops Analytics collecting from you on every site, not just this one. It is at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Turn off personalised ads at Google
Your Google account settings control ad personalisation across Google’s network. My Ad Center is where that switch lives, and it applies wherever you see Google ads.
Global Privacy Control
GPC is a browser-level signal that tells sites not to sell or share your data, and it is recognised under California law. Several browsers and extensions send it without you doing anything per site.
EU and UK rights, and the honest limit on them
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the GDPR and UK GDPR give you the rights below. Our legal basis for analytics and advertising is consent, which — as the section above says — we are not currently collecting properly.
- 01
Access
To ask what personal data is held about you and get a copy of it.
- 02
Rectification
To have inaccurate personal data corrected.
- 03
Erasure
To have personal data deleted, in the circumstances the law specifies.
- 04
Restriction
To have processing paused while a dispute about it is resolved.
- 05
Objection
To object to processing, including profiling for advertising purposes.
- 06
Portability
To receive data you provided in a machine-readable form.
- 07
Withdraw consent
To withdraw consent at any time, as easily as it was given.
- 08
Complain
To complain to your national data protection authority, without going through us first.
Why an access request to us will come back empty
We hold no account for you, no email address and no identifier that could be matched to a person. If you write asking what we hold, the truthful answer is that we cannot identify you and therefore have nothing to retrieve — the GDPR anticipates exactly this and does not require a controller to obtain extra information about you purely to answer.
That is not a brush-off, it is where the data actually is. Data collected through Analytics and AdSense sits with Google, whose privacy policy and account controls govern it, and requests about it are far better directed there. Anything we genuinely can act on — a correction to a page, a question about this policy — goes to the contact page.
Google Analytics and Google AdSense are operated by Google, which processes data in the United States and other countries. Google states that it relies on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and on standard contractual clauses for such transfers; the current position is set out in Google’s own privacy documentation rather than restated here, because paraphrasing a transfer mechanism is a good way to misdescribe it.
California rights, and whether they even apply
Most privacy policies assert CCPA compliance without saying whether the law reaches the site at all. Both halves of that question are worth answering.
The thresholds, and where a site like this sits
The CCPA as amended by the CPRA applies to a business meeting any one of three tests: gross annual revenue above roughly $26.6 million, buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more California consumers, households or devices in a year, or deriving more than half its revenue from selling or sharing personal information. An independent guide site is very unlikely to meet the first or the third. The second turns purely on traffic volume, and a site that reaches a few hundred California readers a day can cross it without ever intending to.
“Selling” and “sharing” are not the same thing
No money is received for data here, so nothing is sold in the everyday sense. But California defines sharing separately, to cover disclosing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising — and advertising cookies are the textbook case. So the accurate answer is that this site does not sell personal information and does engage in sharing as California defines it, for as long as advertising cookies are set.
The rights, offered either way
California residents have the right to know what is collected and why, to delete it, to correct it, to opt out of sale or sharing, to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not to be treated worse for exercising any of them. We do not attempt to work out whether the thresholds are met before answering — the rights are offered to any California reader who asks. The same practical limit applies as above: what we hold is nothing, so an opt-out is best exercised through the controls, which stop the data at source rather than asking us to delete something we never received.
Global Privacy Control
California treats a GPC signal as a valid opt-out of sale and sharing, so a browser that sends it is making the request for you. Because no consent platform is installed here, the signal currently reaches Google’s tags rather than being handled by us, which is another reason the consent tool matters.
Children, changes, security and links out
Children
This site is written for adults choosing desktop software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child — which is easier to say honestly here than on most sites, since there is no mechanism by which anyone of any age can submit information to us.
Security
Pages are served over HTTPS. Beyond that there is little to secure: no logins, no payments and no stored reader data means there is no honeypot here. Email you send us sits in an ordinary mailbox with ordinary mailbox protections, so please do not send anything sensitive — and see the contact page for what we will never ask you for.
Links to other sites
We link out constantly, most often to Meta’s own documentation and download pages. Once you follow a link you are on someone else’s site under their policy, and this one stops applying at the moment you leave. Meta’s handling of data inside its apps is a separate subject, covered in permissions and privacy.
Changes to this policy
The effective date at the top changes whenever the text does, and the most likely change is the one this page keeps promising: a consent tool, at which point the consent section gets rewritten in the past tense. There is no mailing list to announce it on, because there is no mailing list.
Privacy questions, answered short
Does MetaAIMac.com collect my personal information?
The site itself holds nothing about you. There are no accounts, no forms, no newsletter and no database of visitors. What does happen is that two Google services — Analytics and AdSense — load on every page and collect data under their own terms.
What cookies does this site set?
None of our own. The site’s own JavaScript sets no cookies and uses no browser storage. Every cookie you receive comes from Google Analytics or Google AdSense, and they are listed by name, purpose and duration above.
Is there a cookie consent banner?
Not at present. Analytics and advertising scripts load as soon as a page opens, without asking first. That falls short of what EU and UK rules expect, we state it plainly rather than imply otherwise, and the controls in that section are what you have in the meantime.
Do you sell my data?
We receive no money for data and hold none to sell. Under California law, though, using cookies for advertising counts as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising — so the honest answer is that advertising here falls within that definition even though no money changes hands. The California section sets it out.
How do I opt out of tracking on this site?
Block third-party cookies or use a content blocker, install Google’s Analytics opt-out add-on, turn off personalised advertising in My Ad Center, or enable Global Privacy Control in a browser that supports it. Each of these works without our involvement, which is why they are more reliable than asking us.
Can I ask what data you hold about me?
You can ask, and the honest answer will be that we cannot identify you. There is no account, no email list and no identifier here that could be matched to a person, so there is no record to retrieve. Data held by Google should be requested from Google.
Does this site use AI to write its pages?
That is an editorial question rather than a privacy one, and it belongs on the About page with the rest of how the site is made. It has no bearing on what is collected from you, which is described here in full.
How will I know if this policy changes?
The effective date at the top of this page changes whenever the policy does. There is no mailing list to notify, because we do not hold anyone’s email address — which is rather the theme of the whole document.
Questions about any of this?
Privacy questions go to the same address as everything else, and a question that shows this page is wrong is the most useful kind.
This is a plain-English description of how one website handles data, not legal advice to you. For how Meta handles data inside its own apps, see permissions and privacy and Meta’s own policies.