What we collect, and what we don’t

ChildcareCost is published by Sharon Ben-Moshe, an individual — not a company. There is no data team here and no third party we share your information with for money. You can reach the publisher directly at support@childcarecosts.app.

This site uses two tools to see how it’s actually used: Google Analytics 4 for traffic and page views, and PostHog for the same, plus session replay (explained below). Between them, they are the only things on this site that set a cookie or store anything in your browser.

When you load a page, Google Analytics collects:

• The page you viewed, when you viewed it, and the page or search that referred you.
• Your approximate location — country, region, and often city — worked out from your IP address.
• Your device, browser, operating system, screen size, and language.
• A randomly generated identifier kept in a cookie, so a returning browser can be told apart from a new one.

Google processes this for us, and Google’s own terms govern what it does with it. We never send Google your name or email — we don’t have them. We do not use Google Signals, Google Ads linking, or any cross-site advertising feature of Analytics. We read the aggregate reports; we do not try to identify individual visitors, and what is collected is not designed to let us.

See Google’s Privacy Policy and how Google Analytics uses data.

PostHog collects a similar set on top of session replay:

• The page you viewed, your approximate location from your IP address, and your device, browser, and screen size — the same kind of thing Google Analytics collects, described above.
• A randomly generated identifier, stored in your browser, so a returning browser can be told apart from a new one.
• A recording of how you used the page — see below.

PostHog processes this for us under its own terms. As with Google, we never send PostHog your name or email — we don’t have them — and we do not try to identify individual visitors.

See PostHog’s Privacy Policy.

PostHog also records a visual playback of how you used a page — mouse movement, clicks, scrolling or taps, and anything typed into an on-page field, such as the county/state search box. It is a reconstruction of what happened in the page, built from those events — not a video or screen recording, and it captures nothing outside the browser tab the site is running in.

Password fields are masked automatically by PostHog before a recording is even sent; this site has none. The only field on the site is the search box, and it only ever takes a place name.

Recordings are currently kept for 30 days, after which PostHog deletes them. We use them to see where the site is confusing — for example, whether people can find a county through the search box — not to watch anyone in particular.

Three cookies, all first-party(set directly by this site’s own domain, not a third-party one):

That is the complete list. We set no advertising cookies, no third-party tracking pixels, and no “preference” cookies — the site has no settings to remember.

• No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no password, profile, or account data.
• No forms. The site has no contact form, no newsletter box, and no comments. The contact page is a plain email address, on purpose.
• No ads.The site currently runs no advertising and loads no ad network’s code.
• We never sell or share your data. No data broker, no ad network, and no affiliate receives anything about you. Google and PostHog process it for us, as described above — neither is paid to advertise with it.
• Fonts load from this site. Our typefaces are served from our own domain, so your browser makes no request to Google Fonts.

• Hosting.Our host keeps standard server logs — IP address, timestamp, the URL requested, and your browser’s user-agent string — as every web server does. They exist to serve the site and to spot abuse.
• Blog images. Articles are published through Sanity, so images on blog pages are fetched from Sanity’s CDN, which receives the request for that image. It sets no cookie.
• Email. If you email us, we have your address and whatever you wrote, for as long as the message sits in the mailbox. We use it to reply to you and nothing else.

• Block cookies and site storage. Every major browser can block or delete cookies and localStorage for a site. The pages work exactly the same without them — nothing here depends on either.
• Opt out of Google Analytics. Google’s browser opt-out add-on stops Analytics on this site and every other one.
• Block PostHog, including session replay. A privacy or tracking-protection browser extension that blocks requests to posthog.com domains stops both the analytics and the replay recording — there is no PostHog-specific opt-out add-on the way Google offers one.
• Ask us. Because we hold no account and no name, there is usually nothing of yours for us to look up. If you have emailed us and want that correspondence deleted, write to support@childcarecosts.app and we will delete it.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal data about you, or to object to its processing. Email us and we will honour them as far as the law requires. For analytics data specifically, the opt-outs above are the more direct route, since Google or PostHog — not us — hold it.

This site is about the cost of childcare, and it is written for the adults paying it. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13. If you believe a child has sent us information, email us and we will delete it.

The point of this page is that it describes what the site actually does, so it changes when the site does — not on a schedule. If we ever add advertising, a form, or another analytics tool, this page is updated in the same change that ships it, and the date at the top moves. We don’t backdate it.