Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 29, 2025

This Privacy Policy explains how Drone Rater, located at https://dronerater.com/ (the “Website”), collects, uses, maintains, and shares information from users (each, a “User”) of the Website. It applies to the Website and all related products and services provided by Drone Rater. Given the global presence of internet traffic, this policy is intentionally broad to meet the requirements of major international and state-level data protection laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), and other relevant laws.

1. Introduction and Scope of Policy

Drone Rater is dedicated to safeguarding its Users’ privacy. This document explains our commitment to protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and security of any Personal Data we gather. We aim to be transparent about how we handle your information, especially regarding tracking methods used in our affiliate marketing activities, which are essential to this Website’s operation. This policy may be reviewed and updated, so we recommend checking back periodically for the most current version.

The term “Personal Data” means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data). The operation of the Website, which involves publishing drone reviews and earning commission through third-party affiliate links (primarily Amazon), necessarily involves the processing of certain types of data, detailed below.

1.1 The Role of Drone Rater

For the purposes of applicable data protection laws, including the GDPR, Drone Rater acts as the Data Controller for the Personal Data directly collected through the Website (e.g., newsletter sign-ups, comments). When you click on an affiliate link and proceed to a third-party site (like Amazon), that third party becomes the primary data controller for the information you provide on their platform.

2. Information We Collect and Categorization

We may collect and process the following categories of Personal Data about you:

2.1 Identity Data

Includes your name or similar identifier if you leave a comment, register an account (if applicable), or contact us directly. This category is essential for managing user interactions and ensuring personalized communication.

2.2 Contact Data

Includes email address, postal address (if provided for a competition or giveaway, though rare), and telephone numbers (if provided). Primarily, we collect email addresses for subscription services and direct inquiries.

2.3 Technical Data

Includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data (if applicable), browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access this Website. This data is collected automatically via standard server logging and analytics services.

2.4 Usage Data

Includes information about how you use our Website, products, and services, such as the pages you viewed, the duration of your visit, navigation paths, and information about the timing, frequency, and pattern of your service use. This is crucial for understanding user engagement with our review content.

2.5 Commercial Data (Affiliate Tracking Data)

This is specific to our business model. When you click on an affiliate link (e.g., an Amazon link) on our Website, the third-party merchant (e.g., Amazon) places a cookie or uses other tracking technology (like a pixel) to track that click. This data typically includes:

• Referral ID: An anonymous identifier confirming that the click originated from Drone Rater.
• Timestamp: The time of the click.
• Product ID: Identification of the product or article link clicked.
• Transaction Status: After the purchase, we receive anonymized information on the purchase transaction (e.g., product type, total purchase value, commission earned). Drone Rater never receives or stores your name, credit card number, or specific personal delivery address from the merchant.

2.6 Marketing and Communications Data

Includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences. This primarily relates to consent for our newsletter or promotional emails.

Summary of Data Sensitivity: Most of the data collected is non-sensitive usage data. The highly sensitive data (like financial details) is handled exclusively by the third-party merchants (Amazon) and is never processed or stored by Drone Rater.

3. Methods of Data Collection

We use different methods to collect data from and about you, including:

3.1 Direct Interactions

You may give us your Identity and Contact Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by email or otherwise. This includes Personal Data you provide when you:

• Subscribe to our newsletter or other publications.
• Request marketing materials.
• Leave comments or feedback on articles.
• Contact us with an inquiry.

3.2 Automated Technologies or Interactions

As you interact with our Website, we automatically collect Technical Data and Usage Data about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns. We collect this data using cookies, server logs, and other similar technologies.

• Server Logs: Record IP address, time of access, pages requested, etc., for security and diagnostics.
• Cookies: Small text files placed on your device to store data used by web servers. We use various cookies, detailed in Section 14, for functionality and analytics.
• Third-Party Tracking Pixels: Used by third-party affiliate programs (like Amazon Associates) to track the referral from our site to their site for commission purposes.

3.3 Third Parties or Publicly Available Sources

We may receive Personal Data about you from various third parties, including:

• Analytics Providers: Such as Google Analytics, based outside the EU/UK/California, providing Technical and Usage Data.
• Affiliate Networks: From whom we receive the anonymized Commercial Data (Affiliate Tracking Data) related to successful purchases originating from our links.
• Contact Data from publicly available sources (e.g., if you are a representative of a drone company and we contact you for business purposes).

4. How We Use Your Personal Data

We will only use your Personal Data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your Personal Data in the following circumstances and based on the following legal bases (as required by GDPR/UK GDPR):

4.1 Use of Data for Affiliate Revenue

The primary commercial use of data collected via affiliate tracking is to validate and receive commission payments. This process works as follows:

1. A User clicks an Amazon link on Drone Rater.
2. Amazon drops a tracking cookie on the User’s browser, recording that Drone Rater referred the User.
3. If the User makes a qualifying purchase on Amazon within the cookie’s lifetime (typically 24 hours to 90 days, depending on the network and merchant rules), Amazon records the transaction internally.
4. Amazon then informs Drone Rater (via a secure dashboard) that a purchase was made, providing anonymized data (product type, sales amount, commission).
5. Drone Rater never sees the individual user’s name, payment details, or shipping address. We only receive aggregate, anonymized data for accounting purposes.

Our legitimate interest in this processing is based on the necessity of this data to operate the Website as a commercial enterprise and provide free review content to our Users. Without commission validation, the Website cannot sustain its operation.

4.2 Change of Purpose

We will only use your Personal Data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your Personal Data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

5. Affiliate Links, Third-Party Websites, and Tracking

Drone Rater contains links to third-party websites, plug-ins, and applications, most notably Amazon. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements.

5.1 Amazon Associates Disclosure

Drone Rater is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Consent to Tracking: By clicking on an Amazon affiliate link, you acknowledge and accept that you are leaving Drone Rater and are subject to Amazon’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Amazon will use its own tracking methods (cookies, pixels) to determine if you were referred by Drone Rater and if you make a purchase.
• Exclusion of Responsibility: We explicitly disclaim any responsibility for the data collection and processing activities of Amazon or any other third-party merchant once you have navigated away from the Drone Rater domain. We strongly encourage you to review the privacy policy of any third-party website you visit. Our only interaction with this tracking data is the receipt of anonymized commission reports.

6. Data Retention

We will only retain your Personal Data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for Personal Data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the Personal Data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your Personal Data, the purposes for which we process your Personal Data, and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

For example, email addresses collected for newsletters are retained until you unsubscribe. Technical data (like server logs) are typically retained for a short period (e.g., 6 months) for security purposes. Anonymized Commercial Data (Affiliate Tracking) is retained for the required legal accounting period, typically seven years. Upon the expiry of the retention period, your Personal Data will be deleted or anonymized. In some circumstances, we may anonymize your Personal Data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

7. Disclosure of Your Personal Data

We may have to share your Personal Data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in Section 4.

7.1 Internal Third Parties

We may share data with other entities within our group acting as joint controllers or processors, primarily for IT and system administration services and in the context of business restructuring or consolidation.

7.2 External Third Parties

• Service Providers: Acting as processors who provide IT and system administration services, such as website hosting, data backup, and email distribution services.
• Professional Advisers: Including lawyers, bankers, auditors, and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance, and accounting services.
• Governmental or Regulatory Bodies: The Data may be disclosed to a regulatory body (such as a tax authority or a data protection authority) or a government body (such as the police) if we are required to do so by law.
• Third-Party Affiliate Merchants (e.g., Amazon): As explained in Section 5, your click is tracked by them, and data is processed according to their policies. They are independent data controllers for the data they collect.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your Personal Data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your Personal Data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your Personal Data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

8. Data Security

We have implemented appropriate security measures to prevent your Personal Data from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorized way, altered, or disclosed. Access to your Personal Data is limited to employees, agents, contractors, and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your Personal Data on our instructions and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have procedures in place to deal with any suspected Personal Data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. The transmission of information via the internet is never completely secure. Therefore, any transmission of Personal Data is at your own risk.

9. Your Legal Rights and Choices (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, etc.)

Depending on your jurisdiction (e.g., if you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), the UK, or California), you may have specific rights regarding your Personal Data.

9.1 Rights for Users in the EEA/UK (GDPR/UK GDPR)

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your Personal Data, which include:

1. The right to be informed: You have the right to know how your Personal Data is being processed, which is the purpose of this Privacy Policy.
2. The right of access (Data Subject Access Request): You have the right to obtain a copy of the Personal Data we hold about you.
3. The right to rectification: You have the right to have any incomplete or inaccurate Personal Data we hold about you corrected.
4. The right to erasure (“Right to be forgotten”): You have the right to ask us to delete or remove Personal Data where there is no good reason for us to continue processing it.
5. The right to restrict processing: You have the right to ask us to suspend the processing of your Personal Data in certain scenarios (e.g., if you contest the data’s accuracy).
6. The right to data portability: You have the right to request the transfer of your Personal Data to you or to a third party in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
7. The right to object to processing: You have the right to object to the processing of your Personal Data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your Personal Data for direct marketing purposes.
8. The right to withdraw consent: Where we are relying on consent to process your Personal Data, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us using the details in Section 13. We reserve the right to verify your identity before responding to any request.

9.2 Rights for California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have specific rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which include:

1. Right to Know: The right to request that we disclose what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and sell/share.
2. Right to Delete: The right to request the deletion of personal information we have collected, subject to certain exceptions.
3. Right to Opt-Out of Sale or Sharing: The right to direct us not to sell or share your personal information. While we do not “sell” data in the traditional sense for monetary value, the use of certain third-party affiliate tracking cookies may constitute “sharing” under the CPRA for cross-context behavioral advertising.
   • “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information”: We respect this right. You can exercise this right by utilizing the opt-out mechanisms provided in Section 14 (Cookies) or by utilizing an opt-out preference signal (e.g., Global Privacy Control).
4. Right to Correct: The right to request the correction of inaccurate personal information we maintain about you.
5. Right to Limit Use and Disclosure of Sensitive Personal Information (SPI): Although we do not collect Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) as defined by CPRA (such as precise geolocation, health data, financial account passwords, etc.), you have the right to limit the use and disclosure of any SPI we may possess in the future.
6. Right to Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA/CPRA rights.

CCPA/CPRA Data Categories Disclosure: In the preceding 12 months, Drone Rater may have collected the following categories of Personal Information: Identifiers (e.g., email address, IP address), Internet or other similar network activity (Usage Data, Technical Data), and Commercial Information (Affiliate Tracking Data). This information is disclosed to third-party affiliate networks and analytics providers.

To make a verifiable consumer request to exercise your rights, please contact us at the email address provided in Section 13.

10. International Data Transfers

Drone Rater is based in [Your location, e.g., the United States or a specific country – for this generic policy, I will assume US operation with global reach]. Many of our external third parties, such as Google Analytics and Amazon, are based outside the EEA/UK/California, so their processing of your Personal Data will involve a transfer of data outside those regions.

Whenever we transfer your Personal Data out of the EEA/UK, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

• Adequacy Decision: We may transfer your data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for Personal Data by the European Commission.
• Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs): Where adequacy is not confirmed, we use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give Personal Data the same protection it has in Europe.
• Consent: In the absence of the above safeguards, we may rely on explicit consent from you for the specific transfer.

By using the Drone Rater Website, you understand that your information may be transferred to and processed in jurisdictions with potentially different data protection laws than your own.

11. Children’s Privacy (COPPA)

Our Website is not intended for children under 16 years of age, and we do not knowingly collect Personal Data from children under 16. If you are under 16, please do not provide any information on this Website. If we learn we have collected or received Personal Data from a child under 16 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 16, please contact us. We adhere to the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

12. Changes to this Privacy Policy

Drone Rater has the discretion to update this Privacy Policy at any time. When we do, we will revise the “Effective Date” at the top of this page. We encourage Users to frequently check this page for any changes to stay informed about how we are helping to protect the Personal Data we collect. You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to review this Privacy Policy periodically and become aware of modifications. Continued use of the Website after any change indicates acceptance of the revised policy.

13. Contact Information and Data Controller Details

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this Website, or your dealings with this Website, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at the Contact Us page

Data Controller: Drone Rater

Website URL: https://dronerater.com/

Contact Email: [digiwise77@gmail.com]

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the relevant supervisory authority for data protection issues (e.g., the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK or your local EU/EEA data protection authority). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the regulator, so please contact us in the first instance.

For an explanation of our disclaimers and liabilities, please take a look at our full Disclaimer Page.

14. Cookie Policy and Technologies

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.

14.1 Types of Cookies Used

The Website uses the following types of cookies for the purposes set out below:

1. Strictly Necessary Cookies: These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas or remember preferences you have set (e.g., cookie consent preferences). They do not require consent.
2. Analytical/Performance Cookies: These allow us to recognize and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our Website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our Website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily (e.g., Google Analytics cookies). We use these based on your consent.
3. Functionality Cookies: These are used to recognize you when you return to our Website. This enables us to personalize our content for you and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region). We use these based on your consent or legitimate interest in enhancing User experience.
4. Targeting/Affiliate Cookies: These cookies record your visit to our Website, the pages you have visited, and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our Website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests, and, crucially, to track referrals for our Amazon affiliate program. These are placed by third parties (like Amazon) when you click their links. We rely on your implied consent for this, but you can opt out via browser settings or GPC signals.

14.2 Managing and Deleting Cookies (Your Control)

You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the Website and may interfere with affiliate tracking, which supports the Website’s existence.

To delete or block cookies, please consult the help section of your browser. Furthermore, modern browsers and privacy tools offer mechanisms like the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, which we honor as an opt-out request under CCPA/CPRA. For managing third-party advertising cookies, you can also visit network opt-out sites such as the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) or the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA).

Specific Affiliate Cookie Notice: Please note that when you click an Amazon affiliate link, a cookie is placed by Amazon, not by Drone Rater. Your ability to control this cookie is governed by your browser settings and Amazon’s own privacy controls. Clicking the link signifies your understanding and acceptance of this necessary affiliate tracking mechanism.