California Privacy Notice (CIPA)

Last updated: August 2026. Consent disclosure version 2026-08-05. This notice describes actual practices on this site; it is not legal advice, and the site operator should have counsel review it against current law before launch.

The short version

Nothing outside this website is allowed to observe your visit unless you have first said yes. If you have not answered our prompt, if you declined, or if your browser is sending a privacy signal, then no advertising or measurement code runs at all — not in a limited form, not silently, not at reduced capacity. It does not load.

What the law requires

The California Invasion of Privacy Act (Penal Code sections 630 through 638) is an all-party consent statute. It was written for telephone wiretaps, and California courts now apply it to websites. Four provisions matter for a site like this one:

Section 631(a) — no one may read, attempt to read, or learn the contents of a communication in transit without the consent of all parties. When a website lets an outside company observe what a visitor requests and does, that company is arguably reading the communication.
Section 638.51 — no one may install or use a pen register or trap and trace device, meaning anything that captures the routing, addressing, or signalling information of a communication, without consent or a court order. Advertising and analytics tags capture exactly that category of information: IP address, device and browser identifiers, the address of the page requested, and the address of the site that referred the visitor.
Section 632.7 — no one may record a communication involving a mobile or cordless device without the consent of all parties.
Section 637.7 — no one may use an electronic tracking device to determine a person's location or movement without consent.

The defence to all four is the same: prior, informed, affirmative consent from the visitor. Not consent buried in a policy nobody opens, and not consent inferred from the fact that someone kept reading. That is the standard this site is built to meet.

How this site complies

Consent comes first, technically and not just on paper. The advertising script is never present in the page as delivered. It is added to the document only after an affirmative answer is recorded, by code that has no other way to run.
The prompt discloses before it asks. It says that essential cookies keep the site working and that optional cookies are separate, and it links to the cookie policy, which names the recipient — Google — and the categories of information that recipient would receive.
Refusal is the default and costs nothing. Silence, scrolling, clicking a link to another page, pressing Escape, and dismissing the prompt are all treated as refusals. Every article, guide, and calculator behaves identically either way. Nothing is withheld from readers who decline.
Both answers look the same. "Accept all cookies" and "Decline optional cookies" sit side by side at the same size, the same shape, and the same colour. Consent steered by a louder button is not freely given. Narrowing advertising rather than refusing it outright is one click away, on Your Privacy Choices, which the prompt links to in its own text.
Even the network hints wait. Browsers can be told to open a connection to a domain early, before it is needed. Doing that for an advertising domain would disclose your IP address and the timing of your visit before you had agreed to anything, so those hints are created at the moment of consent rather than in the page's head.
Withdrawal is as easy as consent. One click on Your Privacy Choices, no account, no email, no explanation.
Consent is recorded. Each answer produces a receipt so that the site can show what was asked, what was answered, and when. See the consent record below.
Consent expires. An answer is honoured for twelve months. After that, or whenever this disclosure changes in a way that affects what you agreed to, the question is asked again. Consent to an old description is not consent to a new practice.

What is recorded during a visit, and by whom

Two very different things get called "data collection". Keeping them separate is the point of this section.

By us, with no third party involved

Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard request information, including IP address, for a limited period, for security and diagnostics. This is our own record of a communication we are a party to, kept to keep the site running.
Your preferences. Your consent answer and any interface choices are stored in your own browser. They are not a profile, and they are not shared.
Consent receipts. Described below.

By Google, only if you allow it

This site is funded by Google advertising. If — and only if — you allow it, Google receives and may record, as your request happens:

your IP address, and the approximate location it implies;
identifiers for your device, browser, and operating system, including cookies and similar storage it sets;
the address of each page you request on this site while advertising is active;
the address of the page or search that referred you here;
whether an advertisement was displayed, viewable, and clicked.

Google uses that information to select and measure advertising, and — if you chose personalized advertising — to build and consult a profile of your interests across sites. Google acts on its own behalf when it does this, not merely as our contractor, which is precisely why your permission is needed before it happens. Google's own handling of the information is governed by its privacy policy and its description of data collected on partner sites. You can narrow what Google does with it at Google Ad Settings, independently of the choice you make here.

Technologies this site does not use

Most CIPA litigation concerns a specific set of tools. None of them are present here, whether or not you consent:

No session replay or screen recording. Nothing reconstructs, replays, or films your visit.
No keystroke or form capture. Nothing reads what you type as you type it, including text you begin entering and then delete without submitting.
No mouse, scroll, or click heatmaps.
No chat widget, no chatbot, and no live-agent transcript. There is no conversation on this site for a third party to overhear.
No dedicated fingerprinting or device-graph script.
No third-party analytics platform.
No advertising or social pixels from Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Microsoft, or any other network, in pages or in email.
No tracking of your location beyond the coarse region implied by an IP address, and no use of any device location interface.
No sale of the contents of messages you send us.

Our calculators and checklists are worth calling out separately: they run entirely inside your browser. Income, home price, debt, and project figures are computed locally, are never transmitted to us, never reach a server, and never reach an advertiser — regardless of your consent choice.

Consent that cannot be shown is not much use to either of us, so each answer creates a receipt. A receipt contains only:

a random identifier that identifies the receipt and nothing else — it is not derived from you, your device, or your browsing;
the answer given, and whether personalized or non-personalized advertising was chosen;
the version of this disclosure that was on screen when you answered;
the time of the answer;
the path of the page you were reading when you answered;
whether a browser privacy signal was present, and whether you knowingly overrode it.

A receipt deliberately contains no name, no email address, no advertising identifier, and no browsing history. A copy is kept in your browser so you can see it on Your Privacy Choices, and a copy is kept on our side so we can demonstrate what was asked and answered. You can request or delete your record by emailing us with the identifier shown on that page.

Browser signals we honor

Global Privacy Control is a setting some browsers and extensions send automatically to every site, stating that you do not consent to your information being sold or shared. Where it is present we treat it as a refusal and load nothing third-party. We do not ask you to answer a prompt you have already answered at the browser level.

Do Not Track carries no legal force, but a reader who turns it on has plainly not consented, and CIPA turns on consent rather than on which header carries it. We honor it the same way.

If you have set one of those signals and later decide you would rather allow advertising, you can override your own signal deliberately on Your Privacy Choices. We will not do it for you, and we will not treat any other action as an override.

Readers under 18

This site is written for adults and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly request consent to third-party advertising from anyone we know to be under 16. If you believe a minor has been asked for or has given consent here, email us and we will delete the record.

Your other California rights

CIPA sits alongside the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives you the right to know what personal information is collected about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to receive a portable copy, to opt out of its sale or sharing for targeted advertising, to limit the use of sensitive information, and not to be treated worse for exercising any of those rights. Declining advertising here has no effect on what you can read.

To exercise any of those rights, email hello@glad2bhome.com with "Privacy" in the subject line and tell us which right you want to use. We will respond within the period the law allows and may need to verify your identity first. You may use an authorized agent, with proof of authorization.

CIPA also provides a private right of action, meaning a resident can bring a claim directly. We would rather answer your question than be sued over it, so if something on this page does not match what you observe in your browser, please tell us and we will investigate.

Changes to this notice

When we change what is collected, who receives it, or how consent is obtained, we change the disclosure version at the top of this page. That invalidates every consent recorded against the previous version and asks everyone again.

Contact

Privacy questions, consent record requests, and reports of anything that looks wrong: hello@glad2bhome.com.

See also our privacy policy, our advertising policy, and Your Privacy Choices, where you can change or withdraw your answer at any time.