Legal
Privacy
Serial numbers are identifiers for specific, often valuable, physical objects. We treat them accordingly.
Serial numbers stay in your browser
Why we treat serials as sensitive
A guitar serial number identifies one physical instrument. Combined with anything that suggests where it is — an IP address, a referring page, a listing — it becomes information about a valuable object in a particular place. Collecting that would create a risk for our users and no benefit for them.
So we do not collect it. This is a design constraint rather than a policy commitment: the decoder is client-side code, so the serial has nowhere to go.
What happens to a serial you enter
| What we do | |
|---|---|
| Sent to our servers | No. The decoder runs in your browser. |
| Written to server logs | No. It never reaches a server. |
| Placed in the page URL | No. Results are not addressable by serial. |
| Stored in a database | No, unless you choose to include one in a correction report. |
| Sent to analytics | No. See the analytics section below. |
| Retained after you leave | No. It exists in the page and is gone when you close it. |
There are no public pages for individual serial numbers, and there never will be. Building a searchable index of “serial number X belongs to instrument Y” would create exactly the risk described above.
Analytics
This site uses Ahrefs Web Analytics to count visits. It records the page visited, the referring site, and a coarse country and device type. It sets no cookies, it does not track you across other websites, and it does not build a profile of you.
It cannot see a serial number you look up, and that is a consequence of how the site is built rather than a setting we chose. Decoding happens in your browser, and results are never given their own address, so a serial never appears in a page URL for an analytics provider to record. Visiting the lookup page and decoding fifty serials on it produces exactly one pageview containing nothing but the address of the page itself.
Where the site records its own events — which formats are matching, which questions get answered — those carry a manufacturer, the identifier of the rule that matched, whether a match was found and a confidence category. Never the serial, and not a hash of it either: a hash of a short alphanumeric string can be reversed by brute force in moments, so a hashed serial would be an identifier in all but name.
Correction reports
If you submit a correction, we store what you send us so a person can review it. The serial number field on that form is optional and marked as such — a report is usually just as useful without it.
If you do include a serial, it is stored so we can reproduce the problem, and it is not published. Should a public registry of instruments ever be built, serials in it will be masked. Your email address is optional and used only to reply about the report you filed.
Cookies
This site sets no cookies of its own, and no advertising or tracking cookies at all. The analytics provider is cookieless by design, which is why there is no consent banner here — there is nothing to consent to.
Data we do not collect
- Accounts, because there are none.
- Serial numbers entered into the lookup.
- Any profile of what you have searched for.
- Information sold or shared with third parties for marketing.
Your rights
If you have submitted a correction report and want to see, amend or delete it, send another report through the correction form saying so, including the email address you used, and we will deal with it. Because we hold nothing else about you, there is generally nothing else to request.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects how serial numbers are handled, the change will be described here rather than quietly amended. The commitment that the decoder runs client-side is a structural property of Check My Guitar, not a setting.