Privacy

Effective Oct 5, 2026. Updated Oct 17, 2026 (Advertising).

• What we store. Your order email; PayPal's transaction ID, payment status and amount; the payer email PayPal reports (stored as a one-way hash except when needed to deliver your purchase); listing text and private contact email for advertisers; release-email sign-ups; reports you submit. IP addresses are stored only as salted one-way hashes, for rate limits and report counting.
• What we don't do. No analytics services, no tracking cookies, and no third-party fonts or embeds. The only outside script is the adengine.us ad described under Advertising. The web server keeps standard access logs (cPanel) for security and troubleshooting.
• Email. Transactional emails (receipts, links, listing notices) and, only if you opt in, one release email per edition. Every release email has a one-click unsubscribe and our postal address.
• Retention. Orders and payment records: 7 years (tax and accounting). PayPal's notification data: payer personal details redacted after 18 months. Unconfirmed sign-ups: deleted after 14 days. Expired download links and sign-in links: purged.
• Your choices. Delete your data from your library (“Delete my data”); we keep an anonymized payment ledger the law requires.
• Processors. PayPal processes payments under its own privacy policy.
• Children. The site isn't directed to children; purchases require 18+.
• Who's responsible. WeldonPC, 5829 Turney Road, Garfield Heights, OH 44125.

Advertising

Pages on this site show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. The banner is separate from the sponsored listings from bait shops and fishing guides.

It sits below the page content on the home page, lake, county, species, stocking, program and guide pages, the ice-fishing list, the lake finder, About, Methodology, Sources, Data status and Help. It never appears on the fish-consumption pages (Can I eat it?, the advisories list and the advisory guide), print cards, the Almanac page, Advertise, checkout, order, download, library, sign-up or report pages, Terms, Advertiser terms, Privacy, Refunds, Disclaimer or Accessibility, and it is left out when a page is printed.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.