Privacy Policy

Last updated: This Privacy Policy explains how DeskProof AI, operating at the domain deskproofai.com, collects, uses, stores, and protects information about people who visit our website and read our published testing notes. We write about practical AI tools for ordinary professionals, and we try to apply the same standard of honesty to our data practices that we apply to our benchmark numbers: plain language, no hidden footnotes, no claims we cannot support.

By using deskproofai.com, you agree to the practices described below. If you do not agree with any part of this policy, please discontinue use of the site. We encourage you to read this document in full rather than skimming the headings, because the details matter more than the summary.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Information You Provide Directly

DeskProof AI collects personal information only when you choose to give it to us. This typically happens in the following situations:

• Newsletter or update subscriptions: your email address, and optionally a display name or the type of work you do, so we can tailor which tool reviews we send.
• Contact and feedback forms: your name, email address, and the content of your message, including any workplace scenario you describe when asking us to test a specific tool.
• Comments or submitted test results: if you share your own timing data, error counts, or correction notes with us, we store what you submit along with any attribution you request.

We do not ask for government identifiers, financial account numbers, health information, or other sensitive categories of data. Please do not include confidential employer information, client records, or proprietary documents in messages sent to us — we have no secure intake channel for such material and will delete it if received.

1.2 Information Collected Automatically

Like nearly every website, deskproofai.com automatically receives certain technical information when your browser requests a page. This may include your IP address, browser type and version, operating system, device category, referring URL, pages viewed, and the date and time of each request. Our web server records this information in standard access logs, which help us diagnose errors, detect abusive traffic, and understand which articles are actually being read.

1.3 Cookies and Similar Technologies

DeskProof AI uses a small number of cookies and comparable browser storage mechanisms. These fall into three groups:

• Strictly necessary cookies: used for basic site functionality such as remembering your cookie preferences, maintaining session integrity, and protecting forms against automated abuse. These cannot be switched off without breaking parts of the site.
• Preference cookies: used to remember choices such as light or dark reading mode, text size, or your chosen language, so you do not have to reset them on every visit.
• Analytics cookies: used to produce aggregate statistics about how visitors navigate deskproofai.com — for example, how many people reach the end of a long benchmark write-up.

Most browsers allow you to block or delete cookies through their settings. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may cause parts of DeskProof AI to malfunction; blocking analytics or preference cookies will not prevent you from reading any content.

1.4 Analytics

We use website analytics to measure traffic patterns in aggregate. Where possible, we configure analytics to anonymize or truncate IP addresses and to avoid cross-site tracking. We do not build advertising profiles, we do not sell audience segments, and we do not attempt to identify individual readers from analytics data. The questions we ask of analytics are simple: which articles are useful, where readers lose interest, and whether the site is fast enough on ordinary office hardware.

2. How We Use Information

Information collected through deskproofai.com is used for the following purposes and no others:

• To deliver and display the pages, articles, and test results you request.
• To send newsletters, tool reviews, or correction notices to subscribers who have opted in.
• To respond to questions, suggestions, correction reports, and tool testing requests.
• To measure site performance, diagnose technical faults, and improve page load times.
• To understand, in aggregate, which topics deserve deeper testing and follow-up measurement.
• To protect DeskProof AI against spam, scraping, fraud, and attempted intrusion.
• To comply with applicable legal obligations and to enforce our terms of use.

We do not use your personal information to train machine learning models, and we do not feed reader submissions into third-party AI systems as training data. When we test an AI product, we use synthetic or explicitly consented material — never reader correspondence.

3. Legal Bases for Processing

Where data protection law requires a legal basis, DeskProof AI relies on: your consent for newsletters and non-essential cookies; our legitimate interests in operating a secure, functioning, and measurable website; and legal obligation where retention or disclosure is required by law. You may withdraw consent at any time, and withdrawal does not affect processing carried out before withdrawal.

4. Sharing With Third Parties

DeskProof AI does not sell, rent, or trade personal information. We share limited data only with service providers who make the site work, and only to the extent necessary. These categories may include:

• Hosting and infrastructure providers that store site files and serve pages from the deskproofai.com domain.
• Email delivery services that send newsletters and transactional messages to subscribers.
• Analytics providers that process aggregated usage statistics on our behalf.
• Security and anti-abuse services that filter malicious traffic before it reaches our servers.

Each provider is bound by contract to process data only on our instructions and to maintain appropriate safeguards. We may also disclose information where legally compelled by a valid court order, subpoena, or regulatory demand, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of DeskProof AI, our readers, or the public. If our site or publication is ever transferred to a new operator, reader data may be part of that transfer, and we will notify subscribers before any change takes effect.

5. Data Retention

We keep personal information only as long as it serves the purpose for which it was collected:

• Newsletter subscriptions: retained until you unsubscribe, plus a short suppression record so we do not accidentally re-add you.
• Contact form messages: generally retained for up to twenty-four months, so we can follow up on testing requests and track corrections over time.
• Server access logs: typically retained for a limited period measured in weeks or a few months, then deleted or aggregated beyond recognition.
• Aggregate analytics: retained indefinitely in non-identifying, statistical form.

When a retention period ends, records are deleted or irreversibly anonymized according to our routine housekeeping schedule.

6. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights regarding personal information held by DeskProof AI:

• Access: request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction: ask us to fix inaccurate or incomplete records.
• Deletion: ask us to erase your personal data where we have no overriding legal reason to keep it.
• Restriction and objection: ask us to pause or stop certain processing, including processing based on legitimate interests.
• Portability: receive the data you gave us in a common, machine-readable format.
• Opt-out: unsubscribe from all email at any time using the link in every message, or adjust cookie preferences in your browser.
• Complaint: lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority if you believe we have handled your data improperly.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in the final section. We will respond within the time frame required by applicable law, normally within thirty days. We may ask a question or two to confirm that a request genuinely comes from the person whose data is involved, but we will not demand excessive identification.

7. Children's Privacy

DeskProof AI is written for working adults evaluating professional software. The site is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of sixteen. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has submitted personal information to deskproofai.com, please contact us and we will delete the record promptly. We do not conduct age verification beyond this, because doing so would require collecting more data than the site needs.

8. International Data Transfers

DeskProof AI is read internationally, and our hosting, email, and analytics providers may operate servers in countries other than your own. This means your information may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in jurisdictions with data protection rules different from those where you live. Where such transfers involve personal data protected by regional law, we rely on recognized transfer mechanisms — such as standard contractual clauses or adequacy decisions — and we select providers who commit to equivalent safeguards. By using deskproofai.com, you acknowledge that this cross-border processing may occur.

9. Security Measures

We take reasonable and proportionate technical and organizational steps to protect information on DeskProof AI, including encrypted connections (HTTPS) for all pages, restricted administrative access, strong authentication for accounts that can modify the site, routine software patching, and minimization — simply not collecting data we do not need. Access to subscriber lists is limited to the small number of people who operate the publication.

Honesty requires a caveat: no website, ours included, can promise perfect security. If we become aware of a breach affecting personal data, we will investigate, take remedial action, and notify affected individuals and regulators where the law requires it, with a factual account of what happened rather than a vague reassurance.

10. Third-Party Links and External Tools

Our articles frequently link to AI vendors, documentation, pricing pages, and comparison resources. Once you leave deskproofai.com, this policy no longer applies. Each destination site has its own privacy practices, and we encourage you to review them before creating an account or uploading work documents. A link from DeskProof AI is a pointer for evaluation, not an endorsement of another company's data handling.

11. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Signals

Because DeskProof AI does not engage in cross-site behavioral advertising, there is no advertising profile to suppress. Where our analytics configuration supports browser-level privacy signals, we honor them. You may additionally use browser settings, private browsing modes, or content blockers without any loss of access to our articles.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as our tools, providers, or legal obligations change. When we make a material change — for example, adding a new category of collected data — we will revise the "last updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify newsletter subscribers directly. Minor clarifications and wording improvements may be made without notice. Continued use of deskproofai.com after an update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy. We keep changes visible rather than silently rewriting history, consistent with how we publish corrections to our benchmark numbers.

13. Contact Information

Questions, access requests, deletion requests, or complaints about privacy at DeskProof AI can be sent through the contact form on deskproofai.com, or to the privacy contact address published on our contact page. Please include enough detail for us to locate any relevant records — for instance, the email address you subscribed with — and tell us clearly which right you wish to exercise.

We read every message. If something in this policy is unclear, ambiguous, or appears to contradict what the site actually does, we want to hear about it and will correct the text.