Privacy at Marling
We sell a privacy product, so it would be poor form to be vague here. This page says exactly what this website collects, where it goes, and what we will never do with it. It is short because there is not much to tell.
What this site collects
The form asks four things: your first name, your last name, your email address, and optionally your practice or firm. They go into our own database and our internal chat, so that a person replies to you. Nobody outside Marling receives them.
If you only read, we record which page you opened and how far down it you read, what you clicked as a short label, how long you stayed, the width of your window, the site you arrived from as a name such as google.com rather than a full address, and your country. We also keep a short code that stands in for you for one day, which the next section explains.
There are no cookies here, no third-party trackers and no session recorders, nothing about your visit goes to an analytics company, an advertising network or a data broker, and we do not record anything you type.
If your browser is set to say Do Not Track, or carries a Global Privacy Control signal, we record nothing at all. Not a reduced amount: nothing.
Your address, and how we count visitors
Your device's internet address reaches our server, because that is how the web works and no site can avoid it. We use it for two things, and we store it for neither.
The first is to stop a single machine flooding the site with junk.
The second is counting people. Twenty visits in a week might be twenty practices or one person coming back on Tuesdays, and those mean opposite things. Without cookies there is no ordinary way to tell them apart. So we take four things, your address, the description your browser sends of itself, today's date, and a secret that only we hold, and we run them together into a short code. The code is what we keep.
Two things follow from how that code is made, and they are the whole reason we are willing to do it. It cannot be turned back into your address: the secret is what makes that impossible rather than merely hard, and without the secret the code would be guessable in an afternoon. And it changes every day, so the code that stands for you today matches nothing we hold from yesterday and nothing we will hold tomorrow. We can see that four different people read the site on Tuesday. We cannot see that one of them also read it on Monday.
Your address itself is never written down. It exists for as long as it takes to answer your request, and then it is gone.
How long we keep it
The detailed record of each visit expires after about three months and is then gone for good. The daily totals we take from it we keep indefinitely, and almost all of that is plain counting with nothing in it that points at a person.
One part is different, and we would rather say so here than leave you to work it out. If we emailed you and you followed a link from that message, the totals also record what that visit read, filed under the tag that was in your link. That tag is tied to the business we wrote to, so unlike the rest of this it is not anonymous, and it is kept indefinitely too. Ask us and we will delete it.
What you send us through the form we keep until you ask us to delete it. Email us and we will remove it and confirm that we have.
If we email you first
We contact practices and firms using business details they have published, not anything gathered from this website.
Links in those emails carry a short tag that identifies you specifically, so we can see which pages a message actually sent someone to. It is yours alone rather than one shared by everyone who got that message, it appears only in links we email you, and nothing on the site hands it to anyone else.
Every message says who it is from and offers a way to stop hearing from us. Ask once and we will not contact you again.
What we never do
- We do not sell your details, and we never will.
- We do not share them with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else for their own use.
- Our typefaces are served from this site, not from an outside font service, so loading a page tells nobody else that you visited.
This page is about the website.
Marling also sells a small device that strips client details out of requests before they reach an outside AI service. How that device handles your clients' information is a separate matter from how this website handles yours, and is covered separately.
Nothing on this website receives client information, and you should never send any to us through the form.
Asking us what we hold
Write to us and we will tell you what we have about you, correct it, or delete it. We offer this to everyone who asks, wherever you are. We have not tied that promise to a particular state's law, because it should not depend on where you happen to live.
Changes, and how to reach us
If we change what we collect, we will change this page and move the date at the top, on the day it changes. The date tells you when you last had the whole picture.
This website is run by Marling, LLC, a Georgia limited liability company. Questions go to hello@marling.io, and a person answers.