Privacy policy

Who we are

Cost Home Book publishes cost guides for home improvement work in the United States. The site is written and edited by the Cost Home Book editorial team. Questions about this policy go to privacy@costhomebook.com.

What we collect ourselves

Reading a cost guide requires no account and no personal information. We do not ask for your name, address or email to show you a price.

We count page views using analytics software we host on our own server. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier, and builds no profile of you — it records that a page was read, not who read it.

Our server keeps ordinary web logs, including IP addresses, for a short period to diagnose faults and to stop abuse. If you email us, we keep your message and address for as long as it takes to act on it and to check the fix later. We do not add you to a mailing list.

Advertising, and what Google collects

This site shows advertising served by Google. That is where most of the data collection on this site happens, and it is not us doing it.

• Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.
• Google's use of advertising cookies, including the DoubleClick DART cookie, enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the internet.
• Third-party advertisers and ad networks may also use cookies, web beacons or similar technologies on this site. We do not control those cookies and cannot read them.

You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings, and out of many other networks at aboutads.info. Opting out stops the personalisation, not the advertising.

Which cookies exist and how to refuse them is set out in the cookie policy.

Google Analytics

Where Google Analytics is enabled on this site, it uses cookies to report how the site is used in aggregate — which pages are read, from which countries, on which kinds of device. You can prevent it entirely with Google's opt-out browser add-on.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the UK

You have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to how it is used, and to receive a copy in a portable form. Where we rely on consent — which is the case for advertising cookies — you may withdraw it at any time, and the simplest way is through your browser's cookie settings.

Write to privacy@costhomebook.com. We answer within thirty days and will not charge you for it. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

If you are in California

Under the CCPA you may ask what categories of personal information have been collected about you, ask for it to be deleted, and ask us not to sell or share it. We do not sell personal information, and we do not receive money for sharing it.

Advertising cookies set by Google and its partners may count as "sharing" for cross-context behavioral advertising under California law. You can stop that through the opt-out links above or in your browser settings. Exercising any of these rights will not get you a worse version of this site — there is only one version.

Requests go to privacy@costhomebook.com.

Children

This site is written for homeowners and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, write to privacy@costhomebook.com and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

The date at the top of this page is when it last changed. Where a change affects what is collected or who collects it, we will say so here rather than only moving the date.