Your privacy is very important to us. Although most companies say that but then ignore it in practice, we actually feel that way and make the hard calls to live up to it — The Prepared’s founder has been fighting for digital privacy rights since 2000 and even lost their career in government because they supported Edward Snowden and sided with Apple in the FBI vs. Apple encryption debate. Privacy matters!

The Prepared does not:

  • Spam you
  • “Out” you
  • Sell your personal information
  • Work with third parties that sell your personal information, spam you, etc.
  • Take any actions on your social media profiles (or any other third-party service) without your explicit permission
  • Comply with voluntary government requests

You are in control of what personally-identifiable information you give us and/or share with the public via our website and services.

You may use many of The Prepared’s public services without providing any information beyond the basic, standard things collected while browsing the web, such as your IP address, which browser you use (eg. Chrome or Safari), and if you’re on a desktop or mobile device. Cookies are used for industry-standard practices across our services, including remembering when you’re logged into your account and measuring how many readers see an article.

When you choose to, we collect personal information solely for delivering our services to you. For example, you may give us your email address, password, username, picture, credit card information, name, billing address, or shipping address when choosing to buy something.

Such info is stored securely and generally not accessible to anyone outside of The Prepared’s core staff. Exceptions are when it’s necessary to securely transmit info to third-party vendors for actions you take, such as a credit card processor.

Any third-party vendors we work with (eg. Mailchimp for email newsletters) have strong data protection agreements and follow all laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PCI compliance. Some of those partners require us to paste these italicized messages:

We partner with Rakuten Marketing, who may collect personal information when you interact with our site. The collection and use of this information is subject to the privacy policy located here https://rakutenmarketing.com/legal-notices/services-privacy-policy/

GDPR and CCPA: We make every effort to comply with all privacy laws (and have helped write a few of those laws ourselves!) If you are subject to the GDPR or CCPA privacy laws, and any or all of The Prepared’s services (including third-party vendors) are not in compliance, then you may not use our services or you expressly waive any damages/recourse if you continue anyway. We are a small startup, please be kind.

Warrant canary: As of May 2021, The Prepared has not received any government subpoenas.