Privacy Notice

Summary of key points

This summary provides key points from our privacy notice. You can find more detail on any of these topics by following the link after each point, or by using the table of contents below.

What personal information do we process? Most people use this site without giving us any personal information at all — a countdown is built entirely in your browser from the values in the URL. We process personal information when you choose to give it to us, such as by sending us a message through a form. Learn more.

Do we process any sensitive personal information? No. We do not collect or process sensitive categories of personal information.

Do we receive any information from third parties? We do not receive personal information about you from third parties. We do retrieve non-personal sports schedule data from ESPN in order to build the countdowns on our sports pages — see our data sources page.

How do we process your information? To provide and improve the Services, to understand how the site is used, to fund the site through advertising, to respond when you contact us, and to comply with law. Learn more.

In what situations and with which parties do we share personal information? With our hosting and form provider, our analytics provider, and our advertising partners, in the specific circumstances described below. We do not sell your personal information. Learn more.

Do you need to consent? Yes, for anything non-essential. No analytics or advertising cookies are set until you grant consent through our cookie banner, and you can change your choice at any time. Learn more.

What are your rights? Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete your personal information. Learn more.

How do I exercise my rights? The easiest way is to email us at support@zachnology.com. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

1. What information do we collect?

In Short: We collect the information you choose to send us, plus standard technical information that is collected automatically when any website is visited.

Personal information you disclose to us

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us. In practice there are two places on this site where that happens:

• Our contact form — your name, your email address, and the content of your message.
• Our sponsorship enquiry form — your name, your email address, and the content of your enquiry.

Both forms are processed by Netlify, our hosting provider, which stores the submission and forwards it to us. Nothing on this site requires you to create an account, and we do not operate one.

Countdowns you create are not collected. When you build a countdown, the date and the label you enter are encoded into the resulting URL and rendered in your browser. They are not stored in a database of ours and are not associated with you. If you share the link, anyone who has it can open the countdown — which is the point of the link, and worth remembering before you put something private in a countdown’s name.

Sensitive information. We do not process sensitive information.

Information automatically collected

In Short: Some information — such as your IP address and browser characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, country, approximate location inferred from your IP address, and information about how and when you use our Services. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

The information collected automatically includes:

• Log and usage data. Service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information that our hosting provider’s servers automatically record in log files when you access the Services. This may include your IP address, device information, browser type and settings, and information about your activity on the site, such as timestamps and the pages you viewed.
• Device data. Information about the computer, phone, tablet, or other device you use to access the Services, which may include your IP address or proxy server, browser type, hardware model, internet service provider or mobile carrier, operating system, and system configuration.
• Location data. Approximate location inferred from your IP address. We do not collect precise GPS location and never request access to it.

Local storage. The site stores a small number of preferences in your browser’s local storage rather than on our servers: your light or dark theme choice, your language preference, and your cookie consent choices. These never leave your device.

2. How do we process your information?

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve and administer our Services, to communicate with you, to fund the site through advertising, for security, and to comply with law.

We process your personal information for the following reasons:

• To deliver the Services you requested. Running a countdown or count-up timer, rendering the sports and holiday pages, and serving the site itself.
• To respond to your enquiries. When you send us a message, we process your name, email address, and message in order to reply to you.
• To understand and improve how the site is used. With your consent, we use analytics to see which pages are used and where the experience breaks down.
• To fund the site through advertising. Advertising is what pays for the Services being free. With your consent, our advertising partners may use information to select and measure the ads you are shown.
• To keep the Services secure. Identifying and preventing abuse, fraud, and technical attacks.
• To comply with our legal obligations, and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• To save or protect a person’s vital interests, where necessary to prevent harm.

3. What legal bases do we rely on to process your information?

In Short: We only process your personal information when we have a valid legal reason to do so.

If you are located in the EU or UK, this section applies to you.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on in order to process your personal information. We may rely on the following:

• Consent. We rely on consent for all analytics and advertising cookies and similar technologies. You can withdraw your consent at any time — see Withdrawing your consent below.
• Performance of a contract. Where processing is necessary to provide the service you have asked us for.
• Legitimate interests. Where processing is necessary for our legitimate interests in operating and securing the site, and those interests are not overridden by your rights — for example, keeping server logs to detect abuse, and replying to a message you sent us.
• Legal obligations. Where processing is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as cooperating with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercising or defending our legal rights, or disclosing information as evidence in litigation.
• Vital interests. Where processing is necessary to protect your vital interests or those of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.

If you are located in Canada, this section applies to you.

We may process your information if you have given us specific permission (express consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose, or in situations where your permission can be inferred (implied consent). You can withdraw your consent at any time.

In some exceptional cases, we may be legally permitted under applicable law to process your information without your consent, including, for example:

• If collection is clearly in the interests of an individual and consent cannot be obtained in a timely way
• For investigations and fraud detection and prevention
• For business transactions, provided certain conditions are met
• If it is contained in a witness statement and the collection is necessary to assess, process, or settle an insurance claim
• For identifying injured, ill, or deceased persons and communicating with next of kin
• If we have reasonable grounds to believe an individual has been, is, or may be a victim of financial abuse
• If it is reasonable to expect that collection and use with consent would compromise the availability or accuracy of the information, and the collection is reasonable for purposes related to investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province
• If disclosure is required to comply with a subpoena, warrant, court order, or rules of the court relating to the production of records
• If it was produced by an individual in the course of their employment, business, or profession and the collection is consistent with the purposes for which the information was produced
• If the collection is solely for journalistic, artistic, or literary purposes
• If the information is publicly available and is specified by the regulations

4. When and with whom do we share your personal information?

In Short: We share information with the providers that host the site, measure its use, and serve its advertising. We do not sell your personal information.

We share personal information with the following categories of third party:

• Hosting and form processing — Netlify. Netlify hosts this website and processes submissions from our contact and sponsorship forms. In doing so it necessarily processes your IP address and request data, and stores the contents of any form you submit. See Netlify’s privacy policy.
• Analytics — Google Analytics 4, via Google Tag Manager. We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how visitors interact with the Services. We operate under Google Consent Mode v2: no Google Analytics measurement cookies (such as _ga) are set, and no persistent identifier is stored on your device, unless you grant analytics consent through our cookie consent manager. When consent has not been granted, Google may still receive limited cookieless measurement signals — for example an aggregated page view not tied to a persistent identifier — which Google uses only to model aggregate trends.
• Google Signals. With analytics consent, we have enabled Google Signals. When you are signed in to a Google account and have turned on Ads Personalization, Google may associate your visit with information from your Google account to give us aggregated cross-device reporting and demographic and interest information. We do not receive information that identifies you individually. See Google’s Google Signals disclosure. You can control the data Google uses about you at My Ad Center, and opt out of Google Analytics entirely using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
• Advertising partners. With your advertising consent, third-party advertising partners may process information in order to select and measure the ads shown on this site. This is described in full in section 6.
• Business transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
• Legal requirements. We may disclose your information where we are legally required to do so in order to comply with applicable law, governmental requests, a judicial proceeding, a court order, or legal process.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising in exchange for money. We have not done so in the past and have no plans to.

5. Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?

In Short: Yes, but nothing non-essential is set until you consent to it.

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies (such as web beacons and pixels) to access or store information. We use Silktide as our cookie consent manager. Silktide stores your consent preferences in your browser’s local storage (not a cookie), using keys prefixed with stcm.ccn. — which means no consent record is sent to any external server.

Google Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*) are only set after you grant analytics consent via the cookie banner. We implement Google Consent Mode v2, which ensures no measurement cookies fire before consent is given. Before consent is granted, Consent Mode may still send cookieless pings that neither read from nor write to your device, used only to model aggregate measurement. When you grant analytics consent, we may also pass non-identifying measurement parameters between pages through the URL so that your session is counted consistently, and Google Signals is enabled as described in section 4.

Advertising cookies are set only after you grant advertising consent. Until you do, ad identifiers are redacted and advertising storage is denied.

You can update your preferences at any time using the “Manage Cookie Preferences” link in the site footer. Specific detail about each cookie is set out in our Cookie Policy.

6. How is advertising on this site handled?

In Short: Advertising pays for the site. Advertising cookies require your consent, and you can turn them off at any time.

CountdownClock.net is free to use and carries no paid tier. It is funded by third-party advertising and by direct sponsorship of individual pages.

The advertising partners authorised to sell inventory on this site are published in our ads.txt file, which is the industry-standard public record of that authorisation. At the time of writing that list comprises Microsoft Advertising and Xandr/AppNexus. Google, through Google AdSense, may also serve advertising on this site.

Where those partners serve advertising, the following applies:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, may use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. Alternatively, you can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info/choices or youronlinechoices.com.
• Independently of those industry opt-outs, declining advertising consent in our own cookie banner prevents advertising cookies from being set on this site in the first place.

Sponsored placements are labelled where they appear. No advertiser or sponsor has any influence over which teams, holidays, or events we publish countdown pages for.

7. How long do we keep your information?

In Short: Only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for.

We keep personal information only for as long as necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. In practice:

• Messages you send us through a form are retained for as long as needed to handle your enquiry and keep a record of the correspondence, and are deleted when that is no longer necessary.
• Analytics data is retained by Google Analytics for the retention period configured on our Google Analytics property, after which Google deletes the underlying event-level data. Aggregated reporting that cannot identify an individual may be retained beyond that period.
• Server log data is retained by our hosting provider for a short operational period and is used for security and diagnostics.
• Countdowns you create are not retained at all — they exist only in the URL, and there is nothing on our side to delete.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it, or, if that is not possible — for example because it is held in backup archives — we will securely store it and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

8. How do we keep your information safe?

In Short: We use appropriate organisational and technical security measures, but no system is perfectly secure.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process, and the site is served exclusively over HTTPS. However, despite our safeguards, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk.

9. Do we collect information from minors?

In Short: No. We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 13.

The Services are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly solicit data from or market to children under 13 years of age. Our classroom timers are built for teachers to display, not for children to sign up to — nothing on this site requires or offers an account.

If we learn that personal information from a user under 13 has been collected, we will deactivate any associated record and take reasonable measures to promptly delete the data. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from a child under 13, please contact us at support@zachnology.com.

10. What are your privacy rights?

In Short: In some regions you have rights of access, correction, deletion, and objection. You can withdraw consent at any time.

In some regions — including the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Canada — you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right to request access to and obtain a copy of your personal information, to request rectification or erasure, to restrict the processing of your personal information, and, where applicable, to data portability. In certain circumstances you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information.

You can make such a request by contacting us using the details in section 14. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your local data protection supervisory authority. You can find their contact details at the European Data Protection Board’s list of national authorities. If you are located in Switzerland, contact details are available at edoeb.admin.ch.

Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, you have the right to withdraw it at any time. You can do so by using the “Manage Cookie Preferences” link in the site footer, or by contacting us using the details in section 14. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before the withdrawal, nor processing carried out on a lawful basis other than consent.

Cookies and similar technologies: Most web browsers accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can set your browser to remove or reject cookies, though this could affect certain features of the Services. To opt out of interest-based advertising more broadly, see section 6.

If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, email us at support@zachnology.com.

11. Controls for do-not-track features

Most web browsers, and some mobile operating systems and applications, include a Do-Not-Track ("DNT") feature you can activate to signal your preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. No uniform technology standard for recognising and implementing DNT signals has been finalised. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this privacy notice.

Our cookie consent banner is the effective control on this site, and it applies regardless of your DNT setting.

12. Do California residents have specific privacy rights?

In Short: Yes. California residents have specific rights regarding access to their personal information.

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, the "Shine The Light" law, permits users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about the categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes, and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit it in writing using the contact details below.

CCPA/CPRA privacy notice

The California Code of Regulations defines a "resident" as (1) every individual who is in the State of California for other than a temporary or transitory purpose, and (2) every individual who is domiciled in the State of California who is outside the State for a temporary or transitory purpose. All other individuals are defined as "non-residents". If this definition applies to you, we must adhere to certain rights and obligations regarding your personal information.

What categories of personal information do we collect? We have collected the following categories of personal information in the past twelve (12) months:

We may also collect other personal information outside of these categories where you interact with us in person, online, by phone, or by mail in the context of receiving help through our support channels, or in the course of us responding to your enquiries.

How do we use and share your personal information? This is described in section 2 and section 4 of this notice.

Will your information be shared with anyone else? We may disclose your personal information to our service providers pursuant to a written contract between us and each service provider. Each service provider is a for-profit entity that processes the information on our behalf. We may use your personal information for our own business purposes, such as internal research for technological development and demonstration; this is not considered "selling" of your personal information.

Zachnology, LLC has not sold or shared personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising in exchange for monetary consideration in the preceding twelve (12) months, and will not do so in the future. Please note that under the CPRA, the use of advertising cookies with your consent may be treated as "sharing". Declining advertising consent in our cookie banner stops this.

Your rights with respect to your personal data

Right to request deletion of the data — request to delete

You can ask for the deletion of your personal information. If you ask us to delete your personal information, we will respect your request and delete it, subject to certain exceptions provided by law — such as the exercise by another consumer of their right to free speech, our compliance requirements resulting from a legal obligation, or any processing required to protect against illegal activities.

Right to be informed — request to know

Depending on the circumstances, you have a right to know:

• whether we collect and use your personal information;
• the categories of personal information that we collect;
• the purposes for which the collected personal information is used;
• whether we sell or share your personal information to or with third parties;
• the categories of personal information that we sold, shared, or disclosed for a business purpose;
• the categories of third parties to whom the personal information was sold, shared, or disclosed for a business purpose; and
• the business or commercial purpose for collecting, selling, or sharing personal information.

In accordance with applicable law, we are not obligated to provide or delete consumer information that is de-identified in response to a consumer request, or to re-identify individual data to verify a consumer request.

Right to non-discrimination for the exercise of a consumer’s privacy rights

We will not discriminate against you if you exercise your privacy rights.

Verification process

Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine that you are the same person about whom we have information in our system. These verification efforts require us to ask you to provide information so that we can match it with information you have previously provided us. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request.

Other privacy rights

• You may object to the processing of your personal information.
• You may request correction of your personal data if it is incorrect or no longer relevant, or ask to restrict the processing of the information.
• You can designate an authorised agent to make a request under the CCPA on your behalf. We may deny a request from an authorised agent that does not submit proof of valid authorisation to act on your behalf.
• You may request to opt out from any future selling or sharing of your personal information to third parties. Upon receiving an opt-out request, we will act upon it as soon as feasibly possible, and no later than fifteen (15) days from the date of submission.

To exercise these rights, contact us by email at support@zachnology.com, or by using the contact details at the bottom of this notice. If you have a complaint about how we handle your data, we would like to hear from you.

13. Do we make updates to this notice?

In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this privacy notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated date at the top of this page and will be effective as soon as it is accessible. If we make material changes, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this privacy notice periodically.

14. How can you contact us about this notice?

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may email us at support@zachnology.com, use our contact form, or write to us by post at:

15. How can you review, update, or delete the data we collect from you?

Based on the applicable laws of your country, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, to change that information, or to delete it in some circumstances. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, email us at support@zachnology.com. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.