Privacy

Tonewood Atlas keeps data collection to the minimum needed for the site to be useful. We don’t serve advertising, we don’t require an account to browse, we don’t sell or share information with third parties, and we don’t use any kind of cross-site tracking. We do run a privacy-friendly analytics tool (Plausible) for aggregated traffic counts — details below. As the site evolves, what we collect may grow with it; when that happens, we’ll update this page with specifics before any change goes live, rather than hide changes behind generic policy boilerplate.

The one thing we now store that’s personal to you is entirely optional: if you ask us to email you when new guitars match a search or a builder or listing you’re watching, we keep your email address and what you asked us to watch. It’s the first personal information the Atlas has ever stored, so we describe it in full right below.

Email alerts — saved searches & follows

The Atlas has a free, opt-in alerts feature. You can save a search (the filters and terms you’re looking with) or follow a builder or an individual listing, give us an email address, and we’ll send you a short weekly email when something new on the Atlas matches. It’s the only feature that asks for any personal detail, and you only ever reach it by choosing to.

We use double opt-in: when you first sign up, we email you a single confirmation link, and nothing is switched on or sent until you click it. Typing someone else’s address does nothing — only the inbox’s owner can confirm. There’s no password and no login screen; your email address itself is the key, and the links in every alert email let you manage or stop your alerts.

What we store when you turn alerts on:

• Your email address (stored in lower case, used as your identity and to send the alerts).
• The saved searches you created — the same filter and search terms the search page uses — and the builders or listings you chose to follow.
• Timestamps (when you signed up, confirmed, and saved each item), and a couple of random, unguessable tokens that make the “manage” and “unsubscribe” links in your emails work without a password.

How we use it, and how to stop it:

• We send at most one email a week, and none at all in a week when nothing new matches what you’re watching.
• Every email has a Manage your alerts link — review and remove individual saved searches or follows — and a one-click Unsubscribe that turns everything off. Removing an item deletes that record; unsubscribing stops all sending. You can also email us to have everything deleted.
• Your email and what you follow are never sold, shared for marketing, or used for advertising, and they’re never shown to dealers. Anything dealers ever see stays the same aggregate, count-only data described elsewhere on this page — never an individual subscriber.

The alert emails are delivered through Resend, our email provider (see “Third-party services” below), and your subscriber record lives in our Supabase database. Both are used only to make the alerts you asked for work.

Analytics — what we use, what it sees

The Atlas runs Plausible Analytics for aggregated traffic measurement. Plausible is a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics: it uses no cookies, sets no persistent identifiers, and stores no personal information about individual visitors. Their servers are EU-based and the service is GDPR-compliant by design.

What Plausible records on each visit:

• The page URL you viewed.
• The country your visit came from (derived from IP and then discarded — no IP is stored).
• What browser and device type made the request.
• Where you came from (referrer), if your browser sent one.
• Whether you clicked an outbound link (a link to a dealer’s site, for example) — Plausible counts these in aggregate, not to follow you across sites. (We also keep our own per-listing tally of dealer click-throughs; see “Outbound click counts” below.)
• If you used the search bar, the search query you submitted — recorded as an aggregated count so we can see what builders, woods, and shapes our visitors care about. The query text is stored as part of an aggregated tally, not associated with you as an individual.

What Plausible does not record: cookies, persistent IDs, full IP addresses, names, email addresses, mouse movements, scroll behavior, session replays, or anything that could tie aggregate visit counts back to a specific person. Plausible publishes their full data policy if you want to read the original.

Zero-result search logs

When a search on the Atlas returns no listings, we log the search itself so we can review the pattern occasionally and improve coverage — typically that means adding a builder we weren’t tracking, fixing a terminology gap (someone searched for “red spruce” when our data calls it “Adirondack”), or noticing that a popular wood combination isn’t well represented in the index. We only log zero-result searches; successful searches aren’t recorded individually.

What we store per zero-result search:

• The search query text and the filter selections (builder, dealer, wood, body shape, price range) that produced the empty result.
• A short anonymous session token derived by hashing your IP address and browser type together with a daily-rotating salt. The token lets us tell “the same person tried five variations in a row” apart from “five different people happened to try similar searches.” Because the salt rotates daily, the token can’t be used to follow you across days, and the raw IP itself is never stored.
• A timestamp.

What we don’t store: your IP address, your name, your email, cookies, or any identifier that lets the search log be linked back to you as a person. The goal of the log is to surface index gaps, not to profile visitors.

Outbound click counts

When you click through to a dealer’s listing from the Atlas, we add 1 to a daily counter for that specific listing. It’s how we measure the traffic the Atlas sends each dealer. Dealers list with us for free, and aggregate click-through counts are what let us show them that the Atlas is sending real buyers their way.

What each counter row holds:

• Which listing you clicked.
• The day (the date only — not the time).
• Which page on the Atlas the click came from.
• The country your visit came from (derived from IP at our host, then discarded — the IP itself is never stored).
• A running count for that combination.

What it doesn’t hold: your IP address, cookies, any identifier, your browser or device details, the time of day, or anything that ties the click to you as a person. This is deliberately less than what the zero-result search log above keeps — there’s no session token of any kind here, not even the daily-rotating one. It is a plain tally that only ever counts up.

Any click data we ever share with dealers is these aggregate counts only — never anything about an individual visit or visitor.

Shortlist & Compare interest counts

The Atlas has a free Shortlist feature: you can pin a few guitars and open them side by side on the Compare page. When you do, we keep a small set of daily counters, in exactly the same count-only spirit as the outbound click counts above. They help us understand which guitars and which kinds of guitars draw interest — useful for showing dealers (who list with us for free) that their instruments are getting attention, and for spotting what the Atlas should cover better.

What we add to a counter, and when:

• When you add a listing to your Shortlist (or remove it), we add 1 to a daily counter for that listing. Adds and removes are counted separately — we never “subtract” an interest.
• When you open a Shortlist you built yourself on the Compare page, we add 1 to a daily “compared” counter for each guitar in it, and 1 to a daily counter for each pair of guitars in the set — i.e. that two particular guitars were looked at together. That pairing is the one genuinely new thing here: it tells us which instruments shoppers weigh against each other, across different shops.
• The country your visit came from (derived from IP at our host, then discarded — the IP itself is never stored).
• The day only — the date, never the time.

A “pair” counter is stored as nothing more than “some anonymous visitor compared guitar A and guitar B today.” It is not tied to you, and it is not tied to any of your other actions — there is no way to reassemble one person’s session from these counts. If you open a Compare link someone shared with you, that doesn’t add to the pairing counters at all; only sets you assemble yourself do.

What these counters don’t hold: your IP address, cookies, any identifier, your browser or device details, the time of day, or anything that ties an interest to you as a person — the same deliberately minimal shape as the outbound click counts, with no session token of any kind. Your Shortlist itself is saved only in your own browser, on this device, until you clear it — it stays on your machine and isn’t an account, a synced list, or anything we store about you. As with click counts, anything we ever share with dealers is these aggregate totals only, and never a public ranking or “most-shortlisted” leaderboard.

Saved-search & follow interest counts

When someone saves a search or follows a builder or listing (or removes one), we also add 1 to an anonymous daily counter for the thing that was watched — the builder, the dealer, the wood, the body shape. These tallies sit alongside the click and shortlist counters above and follow the same rules: they count what drew interest and on which day, and nothing about who.

What each counter row holds:

• What was followed or searched for — a builder, dealer, or a search criterion like a wood or body shape. For a saved search with several criteria, we also count that those criteria were wanted together (say, an OM body with an Adirondack top) — as a plain tally, nothing more.
• The day (the date only — not the time).
• Whether it was an add or a remove — counted separately; we never “subtract” an interest.
• A running count for that combination.

What these counters don’t hold: your email address, any subscriber ID or token, your IP address, or even the country a visit came from — this is the most minimal counter on this page. There is no way to connect a tally mark back to a subscriber, and deleting your alerts (which removes your email and everything you watched, as described in the alerts section above) works exactly as promised — the anonymous tallies were never linked to you in the first place.

Why we keep them: they show us, in aggregate, what buyers are hoping to find — which builders people watch for, which woods and shapes get saved — so we can improve coverage, and so we can show dealers (who list with us for free) where buyer interest is pointing. Anything a dealer ever sees is these aggregate counts only, with small counts withheld so no single subscriber’s watch could ever be inferred — and never a public ranking or “most-followed” leaderboard.

Search interest counts

When you run a search on the Atlas, we add 1 to an anonymous daily counter for the criteria the search was about — a builder, a wood, a body shape. Same count-only spirit as everything above: what was searched for, on which day, and nothing about who. These counters show us what buyers are actually looking for — which coverage to grow, which dealers to add — and, in aggregate, where buyer interest points for the dealers who list with us for free.

What a counter row holds, and what it doesn’t:

• The criteria only, and only when they match our own catalog vocabulary — a builder or dealer name, a wood, a body shape, a string count, a vintage decade. A search combining several criteria also counts that they were wanted together (say, a Bourgeois slope-shoulder) — as a plain tally, nothing more.
• If you type free text, we match your words against that same vocabulary and count only the recognized parts. The typed phrase itself is never stored — words that don’t match a builder, wood, or shape in our catalog are simply discarded.
• The day only — the date, never the time.
• Not held: your IP address, user-agent, cookies, any session identifier or hash, the country the search came from, your price limits, or anything that could connect a search to you or to any other search you ran. Each tally mark is indistinguishable from every other.

As with every counter on this page: anything a dealer ever sees is aggregate totals only, with small counts withheld — and never a public ranking or “most-searched” list.

What we don’t do

• Browsing the Atlas requires no account, no login, and no password. The optional email alerts use your email address alone as the key — still no password, and no login screen.
• No advertising cookies, no tracking pixels, no third-party ad scripts.
• No selling, sharing, or trading visitor data — including alert subscribers’ emails — with third parties for marketing or any other purpose.
• No general newsletter or marketing blasts, no email harvesting, no buying or renting email lists. The only email we hold is one you entered yourself to switch on alerts, used only for that.
• No cross-site tracking. The Atlas does not follow you across other websites.

The one cookie we use

The Atlas sets a single first-party cookie called tonewood_atlas_currency_pref to remember which currency you chose to display prices in (USD, GBP, EUR, and so on). It contains nothing else. It expires after a year. Clearing it just resets the price display to the dealer’s native currency. Your browser’s “clear cookies for this site” setting wipes it instantly.

Photos and dealer pages

Every guitar photograph on the Atlas is hot-linked from the dealer’s own server — we never download, never rehost. That means when your browser displays a listing’s photo, it makes a normal HTTP request directly to the dealer’s server, which logs that request the same way any website logs visitors. The dealer’s log entry includes your IP address and browser type but says nothing about where the request came from beyond what the browser includes by default.

When you click through to a listing, you leave the Atlas and land on the dealer’s own page. Their privacy practices apply there, not ours.

Server logs

The Atlas runs on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel records standard request information — IP address, timestamp, URL, user-agent — for security and operations purposes. We don’t analyze these logs to build profiles of visitors, and they aren’t shared with anyone.

Third-party services

Two third-party services power the site, both invoked server-side — your browser never talks to either of them directly:

• Supabase hosts our Postgres database (listings, builders, dealers, FX rates). The only personal information it holds is the alert-subscriber records described above — your email and the searches or follows you set up — and only if you turn alerts on. Otherwise it receives no information about you.
• Resend is our email provider. When you opt into alerts, Resend processes your email address (and the contents of the alert) to deliver the message and to handle bounces and unsubscribe requests. It’s used only when you’ve asked for alerts, and never for anything else.
• Frankfurter.dev provides the daily ECB-backed currency exchange rates we use for price conversion. We fetch rates once a day from our server; your browser never connects to them.

Children

The Atlas isn’t directed at children, and since we don’t collect personal information from anyone, we don’t collect any from children either.

What may change

The Atlas is early. As it evolves, some of what’s on this page will too. We’d rather be honest about the likely direction than make “never” promises we have to walk back later.

Two changes are on the roadmap that would affect what we collect:

• A paid subscription tier. When this launches, subscribers will provide an email address and a payment method. The payment is handled by a payment processor (likely Stripe); we’ll store the email plus the processor’s customer ID, and that’s it. Browsing the free Atlas will continue to require no account at all.
• A verified-dealer program. Dealers we work with may eventually be able to edit their own pages directly, which means at minimum we’ll hold an email and an authentication record per verified dealer. Listings and visitor browsing aren’t affected by this.

Any of these changes will be reflected on this page before they go live, with the “last updated” date below revised so the change is easy to spot. The firm commitments hold regardless: no selling personal information, no behavioral tracking, no third-party advertising scripts, and no cross-site tracking.

Questions

For anything privacy-related, including any request to confirm what (if anything) we have on you or to remove information, write to hello@tonewoodatlas.com. You can also read our About page for the broader picture of what the Atlas does.

Last updated: 2 July 2026 — added the “Search interest counts” section describing the anonymous, count-only daily tallies of executed search criteria (typed phrases are matched against our catalog vocabulary and never stored). Previous update, 1 July 2026: added the “Saved-search & follow interest counts” section describing the anonymous, count-only daily tallies of what alert subscribers watch for. Previous update, 29 June 2026: added optional email alerts (saved searches and follows for builders and listings) — the first personal information the Atlas stores; see the “Email alerts” section above.