Privacy Policy

Our Commitment to Your Privacy

At Metallography.org, we are committed to protecting your privacy. We believe in transparency and want you to understand how we handle information when you visit our website.

Data Collection

Our website is designed to provide free educational resources and guides without requiring any registration or account creation for general browsing. We collect limited information to improve our website and provide better services.

Specifically, we do not:

• Require user registration or account creation to access our content
• Use cookies to track user behavior or preferences
• Share or sell any user data to third parties
• Collect personal information without your explicit consent (except for analytics data described below)

Contact Form Data

When you submit a message through our contact form, we collect the following information:

• Name (required) - To address you personally in our response
• Email address (required) - To respond to your inquiry
• Subject (optional) - To categorize and route your message appropriately
• Message content (required) - The details of your inquiry or feedback

How we use this information:

• To respond to your inquiry or request
• To provide customer support or technical assistance
• To improve our website and services based on feedback

Data retention: We retain contact form submissions only as long as necessary to respond to your inquiry and for a reasonable period thereafter for record-keeping purposes. You may request deletion of your contact information at any time by contacting us.

Data sharing: We do not share, sell, or rent your contact form information to any third parties. Your information is used solely for the purpose of responding to your inquiry.

Website Analytics and Page View Tracking

We collect basic website analytics to understand usage patterns and improve our content and user experience. This tracking is done without using cookies.

What we collect:

• Page views: Which pages you visit on our website
• IP address: Used to determine approximate geographic location (country, region, city) for analytics purposes
• Device information: Device type (desktop, mobile, tablet), browser type, and operating system
• Referrer information: The website that referred you to our site (if applicable)
• Session information: Temporary session identifiers stored only in your browser's session storage (cleared when you close your browser)

How we use this information:

• To understand which content is most popular and useful to our visitors
• To analyze traffic patterns and improve site navigation
• To understand the geographic distribution of our audience
• To optimize our website for different devices and browsers

Important notes:

• We do not use cookies for this tracking - we use browser session storage which is automatically cleared when you close your browser
• We do not create persistent tracking identifiers that follow you across sessions
• IP addresses are used only for geographic analysis and are not linked to your personal identity
• We automatically filter out known bots and crawlers
• This data is stored in our database for analytics purposes but is not shared with third parties

Newsletter Subscriptions

When you subscribe to our newsletter, we collect:

• Email address (required) - To send you newsletter updates
• IP address - For spam prevention and security
• Subscription source - Where on our website you subscribed

How we use this information:

• To send you newsletter updates and blog post notifications
• To prevent spam and abuse
• To understand which parts of our site drive newsletter subscriptions

Unsubscribing: You can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any newsletter email, or by contacting us directly.

Third-Party Links

Our website may contain links to external websites, including our related sites (shop.metallographic.com, metallographic.com). We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these external sites. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any external websites you visit.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically to stay informed about how we protect your privacy.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us through our website or visit our contact page.