What we collect, and what we don’t.

1. Who we are and what this covers

Earnings Whispers (“we,” “us”) operates earningswhispers.com and the research, data, and email products offered through it. This policy covers information we collect through the website, our newsletters and alerts, and when you contact us for support.

It does not cover companies whose sites you reach through links from ours, or data you give directly to a third party — see section 13.

2. Information we collect

What you give us

• Account information. Your email address and a password, which we store only as a salted hash — we cannot read it, and we cannot tell you what it is. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and basic profile information from Google instead, and no password is created.
• Subscription and billing information. What you subscribed to, when, and its current status. Card details are entered directly with our payment processor and never reach our servers; we receive a confirmation, the last four digits, and an expiration date so you can recognize the card on file.
• Things you save in the product. Watchlists, saved screens, chart settings, alert rules, and display preferences.
• Sentiment and survey responses. If you record a sentiment reading on a stock, we store your response along with the ticker and the date. These feed the aggregate sentiment figures shown across the site. Aggregate figures never identify individual respondents.
• What you write to us. Support email, contact-form submissions, and anything you attach to them.

What we collect automatically

• Server logs. IP address, timestamp, page requested, referring page, and browser user-agent string. These are written for every request by the web server.
• Usage within your account. Which pages and tickers you looked at while signed in, so we can size infrastructure, enforce subscription limits, and see which features are worth continuing to build.
• Approximate location. Inferred from your IP address at roughly the city or region level. We do not collect precise device location, and we do not ask for it.
• Advertising identifiers. On pages that carry ads, Google and its advertising partners set and read their own cookies containing a random identifier, and receive your IP address, the page you are on, and your browser type. This is described in section 5.

What we don’t collect

We do not collect your brokerage credentials, account balances, positions, trades, or portfolio holdings. We do not ask for a Social Security number, a date of birth, or a government ID. We do not buy personal information about you from data brokers or append third-party demographic data to your account.

3. How we use it

• To run the product — sign you in, show you what your subscription includes, save your watchlists, send the alerts you asked for.
• To bill you and to handle renewals, receipts, failed payments, and refunds.
• To support you when you write in, which sometimes means looking at your account to work out what went wrong.
• To send service messages — renewal notices, password resets, security alerts, and material changes to this policy. These are part of having an account and are not marketing; you can’t opt out of them while your account is open.
• To send research and marketing email if you asked for it, and to stop the moment you unsubscribe.
• To show and measure advertising on our free pages, and to be paid for it. See section 5.
• To improve the site by looking at which features get used and where people get stuck.
• To produce aggregate statistics, including the investor sentiment readings published across the site. Aggregates are not personal information and cannot be traced back to you.
• To protect the service — detecting credential sharing, scraping, fraud, and abuse, and enforcing our terms.
• To meet legal and accounting obligations.

We do not use your personal information to train machine learning models that are shared outside Earnings Whispers, and we do not send your account information to third-party AI services.

4. Cookies and local storage

Rather than describe cookies in the abstract, here is what our own site sets. If you find one on earningswhispers.com that isn’t on this list or described in section 5, we want to know.

Ours are all strictly necessary or preference cookies. None of them track you across other websites. Advertising cookies are a separate matter — they are set by Google and its partners rather than by us, and the next section covers them.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. If you block ours, you will not be able to sign in, and subscriber pages will not recognize you.

5. Advertising

Advertising is what keeps the free side of Earnings Whispers free. We want to be specific about what that costs you, because “we work with trusted partners” is not an answer.

What actually happens

We use Google AdSense to serve the ads on our free pages. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or to other websites. Those vendors may also place and read cookies on your browser, or use web beacons or your IP address, to collect information as a result of ad serving on our site.

Concretely: when an ad loads, Google receives your IP address, the page you are viewing, your browser and device type, and a cookie identifier it has assigned to your browser. It uses that to decide which ad to show, to avoid showing you the same one repeatedly, to detect fraudulent clicks, and to report to advertisers in aggregate.

Google’s own account of this is at How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services .

What ad companies never get

We do not pass your email address, name, account number, or any other identifying information to Google or to any advertiser. We do not build audience segments out of your account activity, we do not upload customer lists for ad targeting, and we do not let advertisers use our data to find you elsewhere. The ad tags see the page you are on; they do not see who you are.

Ads do not appear on subscriber pages, and the ad tags are not loaded there.

Turning it off

• Our opt-out. Your Privacy Choices stops us sharing your information for personalized advertising on this site. You will still see ads — they just won’t be chosen based on your browsing.
• Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal, we treat it as an opt-out automatically. You don’t need to do anything else, and we confirm on the Your Privacy Choices page that we received it.
• Google’s own controls. You can turn off ad personalization across everything Google serves, not just our site, at My Ad Center.
• Your browser. Blocking third-party cookies prevents most ad tracking and won’t break anything on our site.

Non-personalized ads still use cookies — for frequency capping, fraud prevention, and counting. Opting out changes how ads are chosen; it doesn’t make the ad system cookie-free, and we’d rather say that than imply otherwise.

Ads in our emails

Sponsorships in our newsletters work differently and more simply: we place that copy by hand, the same block goes to everyone who receives it, and no advertising network is involved. Nobody gets your email address, no third-party tag runs when you open the message, and no advertiser learns anything about you from it. Paying subscribers don’t receive the sponsor blocks at all.

Our email provider records ordinary delivery statistics — whether a message was delivered, opened, or clicked — so we know whether the newsletter is working. That’s our own reporting, not an advertiser’s, and sponsors receive totals rather than anything about individual readers.

Analytics

We do not embed third-party analytics. Our understanding of who uses the site comes from our own server logs, which stay on our own infrastructure.

6. When we disclose information

There are six situations, and no others.

Service providers

Companies that do specific jobs for us: payment processing, transactional and newsletter email delivery, cloud hosting, and error monitoring. They receive only what that job requires, are contractually barred from using it for anything else, and cannot sell it.

Advertising partners

Google and the advertising vendors it works with, as described in section 5. They receive cookie identifiers, IP address, and the page being viewed — never your name, email, or account information. This is the one disclosure on this list you can switch off, at Your Privacy Choices.

Google, if you use Google Sign-In

Choosing “Continue with Google” tells Google you signed in here, and gives us your email address and basic profile in return. This only happens if you use that button, and it is separate from advertising. Google’s handling of it is governed by Google’s privacy policy, not ours.

When the law requires it

In response to a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process. Where we are permitted to tell you first, we will.

To protect the service or someone’s safety

Where we have a good-faith belief disclosure is necessary to investigate fraud, stop abuse of the service, enforce our terms, or prevent harm.

In a business transfer

If Earnings Whispers is ever acquired or merged, account information would transfer with the business. Any acquirer would be bound by this policy for information collected before the transfer, and we would give you notice and a chance to delete your account first.

The previous version of this policy allowed us to forward member email addresses to third parties who made “Special Offers.” We don’t do that, and the permission is gone.

7. Your choices

8. US state privacy rights

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and a growing number of other states give residents specific rights over their personal information. We extend all of them to everyone, so you do not need to work out whether your state qualifies.

• Know what personal information we have collected, where it came from, why, and who we disclosed it to.
• Access a copy of it, in a portable format.
• Correct anything inaccurate.
• Delete it, subject to legal retention requirements.
• Opt out of sale, sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, and profiling with legal effects.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising any of the above. Your subscription, pricing, and service stay exactly the same.

Sale and sharing

We do not sell your personal information. Nobody pays us for data about you, and we have not sold personal information in the preceding twelve months.

We do share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. “Share” is a term of art in California law, and it covers what happens when Google reads an advertising cookie on our pages. We’d rather say so plainly than hide behind the fact that no money changes hands for the data itself. The categories involved are identifiers (cookie IDs and IP address), internet activity (the page you are on), and approximate geolocation — disclosed to advertising networks for the purpose of selecting and measuring ads.

You can turn it off at Your Privacy Choices. We honor Global Privacy Control as a valid opt-out request without requiring you to identify yourself or create an account. Because we deliberately don’t require you to identify yourself, the choice is remembered per browser rather than per account — so set it on each browser you use, or turn on Global Privacy Control, which travels with you. We do not share the personal information of anyone we know to be under 16.

Categories collected

We do not collect sensitive personal information as defined by these laws — no government identifiers, precise geolocation, racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, health data, biometrics, or contents of your mail or messages. Because we don’t collect it, there is nothing to limit.

Making a request

Email privacy@earningswhispers.com or use our contact form. We will confirm receipt within 10 business days and respond within 45 days, extending once by another 45 if a request is complex — we’ll tell you if that happens. To protect your account, we verify access and deletion requests against the email address on file. Opting out of advertising requires no verification and no account.

An authorized agent may make a request for you with written permission we can verify. If we deny a request and you think we got it wrong, reply to our response and say so; we will review it again and explain the outcome. If you are still unsatisfied, you may contact your state attorney general.

9. How long we keep things

• Account information — while your account is open, and for a short period after you close it in case you come back or a billing question arises.
• Billing records — seven years, because tax and accounting rules require it. These survive account deletion.
• Server logs — a rolling window measured in months, then discarded.
• Sentiment responses — kept indefinitely once separated from your identity, because the historical aggregate series is part of the research product. Your individual responses are removed if you delete your account.
• Support correspondence — a few years, so we have the history if you write in again about the same thing.
• Advertising cookies — set and expired by Google under its own retention rules, not ours. Your opt-out choice is kept for 13 months, then we ask again.

10. Security

Traffic to and from the site is encrypted with TLS. Passwords are stored as salted hashes, never in readable form. Card numbers never reach our servers. Access to production data is limited to those who need it to operate the service.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won’t claim otherwise. If a breach ever affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant regulators as the law requires.

Two things on your side: use a password you don’t use anywhere else, and know that we will never ask for your password — not by email, not by phone, not in support chat. Anyone who does is not us.

If you believe you’ve found a security vulnerability, please report it to security@earningswhispers.com rather than disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you on it.

11. EEA, UK and Swiss users

We operate from the United States, and if you use the site from Europe your information is processed here. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, we rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, we ask for your consent through a consent banner before any advertising or other non-essential cookie is set. You can change or withdraw that consent at any time from the same banner, and withdrawing it does not affect anything you have already subscribed to.

Our legal bases for processing are:

• Performance of a contract — running your account and delivering what you subscribed to.
• Legitimate interests — securing the service, preventing fraud, and improving the product, balanced against your rights.
• Consent — marketing email, plus advertising and other non-essential cookies, which you can withdraw at any time without affecting your subscription.
• Legal obligation — tax, accounting, and responses to lawful requests.

In addition to the rights in section 8, you may object to or ask us to restrict certain processing, and you may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority. We’d appreciate the chance to sort it out first.

12. Children

Earnings Whispers is built for investors and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. No part of the site is directed to children, and we do not knowingly share the personal information of anyone under 16 for advertising. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

13. Other sites

We link out to filings, company sites, news coverage, and academic research. Following one of those links takes you somewhere we don’t control and this policy stops applying. Sites you land on may set their own cookies and collect their own data under their own terms. The same goes for advertisements: clicking one takes you to the advertiser, whose privacy practices are their own.

14. Changes to this policy

We update this page when our practices change. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.

For material changes — anything that meaningfully affects what we collect, how we use it, or who receives it — we will post notice on the site and email registered members before the change takes effect. We won’t quietly reinterpret an old policy to cover something new.