Collection policy
What we read, at what rate, and the requests we decline. Published because every legal team asks first, and our own addresses depend on the answer.
This page is not boilerplate. It describes what the software actually does, and the parts that say "we decline" are enforced in code rather than promised in prose.
What we read
Public listing pages — the same pages a shopper sees without signing in. Prices, titles, availability, and the identity of the seller who published them.
What we check before reading
robots.txt, every time. A path that is disallowed is not fetched. Where a site publishes a crawl-delay, that delay is the floor; where it publishes none, we choose one and it is documented per source.
The response. A site that answers 403 or 429 is refusing. We record the refusal with its date, stop, and do not retry on a schedule. Sources that refuse us stay unread; we do not look for a way around a refusal.
What we decline to do
These are not aspirations. Each is absent from the code, and a customer asking for one is a customer we turn down.
- No fingerprint spoofing. We do not disguise what the client is.
- No CAPTCHA bypass. A challenge is an answer, and the answer is no.
- No authentication bypass. We read what a visitor can read without an account.
- No exceeding a stated limit. Rotating addresses to get around a rate limit is evasion, not capacity, and we do not sell it.
- No collection of personal data. We read prices and product listings. Where a seller is a named business we record the business; where a listing carries an individual's details we do not retain them.
There is a commercial reason as well as a principled one. A source that refuses us once is a source nobody gets back, and the loss falls on every customer who needed it. The incentive and the ethics point the same way.
What we record
Every observation carries the source, the listing URL, the moment it was read, the price as published, the price with consumption tax removed, and the exchange rate used with the rate's own publication date. That is what makes a figure checkable rather than merely stated.
Removal
If you operate a site and would prefer we did not read it, write to us and we will stop, add the source to our refused list, and delete what we hold from it. We will not ask you to justify the request.
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