Privacy notice

There are no advertising trackers, no third-party analytics scripts, no cross-site profiles and nothing sold to anyone. Traffic is counted on our own servers so we can see which malls, outlet centers, brands and shops people actually use, and the counting is designed from the start to work without identifying you: no IP address is stored, and the only identifier is a random string your browser replaces every day.

The site is funded by Amazon affiliate commission. We log which links are clicked — never who clicked them — because that is the only way to know which listings are worth writing.

Outlets.info is an independent editorial directory of US outlet centers, full-line malls, brands and individual shops. We are the controller for the counting described here. This notice covers everything served on this website, including the mall, outlet, brand, store, deal and guide pages, the saving calculators and the deal submission form.

It does not cover the sites we link to. Retailer, operator and Amazon pages run their own cookies and their own policies from the moment you arrive there.

One small first-party request is sent when you open a page. Below is the complete list of fields it can contain — there are no others, and nothing is added later.

Never collected, in any form:

• IP addresses
• Names or email addresses (except deal submissions)
• Advertising or cross-site identifiers
• Third-party analytics scripts
• Precise location
• Fingerprinting signals
• User accounts or passwords
• Data sold or licensed to anyone

Reporting is aggregate only: counts by page, listing, referring site, device class and day. There is no screen anywhere in the site that shows one visitor's browsing history, because the data cannot be assembled into one.

We participate in the Amazon Associates programme. Price-check links across the site carry our affiliate tag, and a qualifying purchase earns us a commission at no extra cost to you. Commission never changes which centers, brands or shops we cover, nor the discount levels we publish — those are editorial judgements made before any link is added.

When you follow one of those links we record:

The click log holds no visitor identifier at all — it answers "which placement works", not "who clicked". Once you land on Amazon, Amazon's own cookies, reporting and privacy policy apply; we receive only aggregate earnings reports from them, with no customer details and no order contents.

We set no advertising or cross-site cookies. Three items live in your own browser and never leave it, except the rotating id which travels with the view request:

Your watchlist is device-local by design: it does not follow you between phone and laptop, and we cannot read it, restore it or transfer it.

If you submit a deal to the community board you may include an email address so we can query the detail before publishing. It is used for that single purpose. It is never published beside the deal, never added to a marketing list, and never shared with the retailer or operator concerned.

Submitted deals stay unpublished until an editor checks them. We may edit wording, correct dates or decline a submission entirely.

Where UK or EU data protection law applies, our lawful basis for aggregate view and click counting is legitimate interests: running and improving an editorial site, and understanding which pages are worth maintaining. The processing is deliberately minimised — no IP retention, no persistent identifier, no profiling and no automated decision-making — so the impact on you is negligible. For deal submissions the basis is your consent, given by sending the form, which you can withdraw at any time.

Under US state privacy laws we do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. We honour Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals by default, because we run no advertising trackers to switch off in the first place.

Three categories of processor, and no others: our hosting and content delivery provider, which serves the pages and supplies the country code; our managed database provider, which stores the aggregate view and click rows; and Amazon, which receives the affiliate click as an ordinary web request when you choose to follow a link. None of them receive a customer list from us, because we do not hold one.

Hosting and database infrastructure may process data in the United States. Where UK or EU transfer rules apply, those transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses in our providers' data processing terms.

View and click rows are kept for up to 24 months so year-on-year seasonal patterns (Black Friday, the January and July clearance cycles) can be compared. A scheduled job runs every night and permanently deletes any view or click row older than 24 months — nothing is retained beyond that window. The rotating visitor id becomes meaningless after a day by construction, so older rows cannot be linked together even by us. Deal submission emails are deleted once the deal is published or declined.

The view and click tables are write-only from the public site: a browser can add a row and can never read one back. Reporting is behind a separate key held by the site's editors, and the report screens are excluded from search engines. Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit.

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete or port your personal data, to object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to complain to a supervisory authority. We will always honour a valid request.

One honest limitation: for view and click records we hold no identifier that could connect a row to you, so we usually cannot find "your" data to export or erase. That is a deliberate design choice rather than an evasion. You can achieve the same result immediately yourself:

• Clearing site data removes the rotating id, the session flag and your watchlist.
• A private window, a tracker-blocking extension or disabling JavaScript stops view counting entirely; every page still works.
• Ignoring the price-check links means no click is ever logged.

For a deal submission we can find and delete your email address on request — just tell us which submission it was.

This is a shopping reference site for adults. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us an email address through the submission form, contact us and we will delete it.

When the counting changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. Material changes — a new processor, a new field, a longer retention period — will be described here rather than quietly absorbed.

Send privacy questions, deletion requests and corrections through the deal submission form, marking the message as a privacy query, and an editor will pick it up. The commercial and editorial terms — including our standpoint on retail, culture and the wider world — are set out in the terms of use.