PRIVACY POLICY

This site — theboomsquad.com — is published by Diode Media Group, and is the home of The Boom Squad books by Dr. Aaron George Glover.

If you have a question about privacy, or you want your information removed, get in touch and we will sort it out.

You can browse this entire website without telling us anything about yourself. There are no accounts to create, no logins and nothing to buy here.

We only ever get your details when you type them in yourself:

• Joining the Squad. The mailing list form asks for a first name and an email address. That's it.
• Sending a message. If you use the contact form, we get the name, email address and message you typed, so we can reply.

We never ask for a home address, a phone number, a date of birth or payment details, because we don't need them. Books are bought from Amazon and other retailers, not from us — so if you buy a book, that shop handles the order and the payment, and we never see your card details.

The stories on this site are written for children. The forms on this site are not.

The mailing list and the contact form are meant for parents, grandparents, guardians, teachers and children's ministry leaders. We ask that children do not sign up or send messages without a grown-up doing it with them, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

If you're a parent or guardian and you think your child has sent us their details, tell us and we will delete them straight away — no explanation needed.

We have also deliberately switched off the advertising and cross-device tracking features in our visitor statistics, and we do not allow any advertising network to track visitors here.

Only for the reason you gave it to us:

• A name and email address on the mailing list is used to send Squad news, new book alerts and free resources — nothing else.
• A message sent through the contact form is used to reply to you.

We don't add people to the mailing list because they sent us a message, and we don't pass anyone's details to another company to market to them.

Our mailing list is run using Kit (kit.com), an email service. When you sign up, your first name and email address are stored on Kit's system so they can send you the emails you asked for.

You will be asked to confirm by clicking a link in an email, so nobody can put your address on the list but you. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom — one click and you're off, and we don't ask why.

We use Google Analytics to count how many people visit and which pages they read. This tells us things like "the villains page is popular" or "nobody is finding the free coloring pages" — which is genuinely how we decide what to build next.

It records things like the page you looked at, roughly which country or region you're in, and what kind of device and browser you used. It does not tell us your name.

We have turned off the two features that would make this feel like tracking: Google Signals (which links visits to people's Google accounts across devices) and advertising personalisation. Nothing gathered here is used to show you adverts anywhere.

If you'd rather not be counted at all, most browsers have a "do not track" or tracker-blocking setting, and Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics everywhere.

A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser. This site uses very few:

• Visitor counting. Google Analytics sets a couple of cookies so a person clicking through three pages is counted as one visit and not three.
• Videos. If you play one of the videos on the site, YouTube may store something in your browser. We load YouTube in its privacy-enhanced mode, which means YouTube does not store anything about you unless you actually press play.

There are no advertising cookies here, and nothing on this site follows you to other websites.

Running a website means a few other companies help make it work. Because your browser has to talk to them to load the page, each one can see your IP address — the same way the postman can see your street. Here they are, and what each one does:

• Vercel — hosts the site and serves the pages. Keeps standard server logs.
• Google Analytics — counts visits, as described above.
• Kit — runs the mailing list.
• Resend — delivers the messages you send us through the contact form.
• Google Fonts and Cloudflare (cdnjs) — supply the lettering and the animation code the pages use.
• YouTube — shows the videos, in privacy-enhanced mode.
• Google Drive — where the free printable activity pages are stored.

Each of these has its own privacy policy, and none of them is paid by us to advertise to you.

We link out to places like Amazon, Bible.com, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Once you click one of those, you're on their website and their rules apply, not ours. We'd encourage any grown-up to glance at what a site does with data before letting a child use it — including the big ones.

Mailing list details stay on the list until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove them. Messages sent to us are kept while we're dealing with them and for a reasonable while afterwards in case you write again. Visit statistics are anonymous counts and are kept for a limited period by Google Analytics — currently set to expire automatically.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you,
• correct it if we've got it wrong,
• delete it, or
• stop emailing you.

Just ask. We'll do it, and we won't make it difficult. Depending on where you live you may have further rights under laws such as the UK and EU GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act — if you want to exercise any of them, say so and we'll help.

The site runs over a secure (https) connection, and the mailing list and any messages are held on the accounts of the services named above, protected by their security and ours. No website can promise perfect security, but we don't hold much in the first place — which is the best protection there is.

If we start doing something new with information — a shop, say, or a members' area — we'll update this page and change the date at the top before it goes live. Worth a glance now and then.