Privacy

Effective Oct 4, 2026. Last changed Oct 17, 2026.

What we collect

• Email address when you sign in, claim, list, buy, remove or restore something, or report a listing (optional). We use it to send sign-in links, receipts, reminders, confirmations and, for live listings, a monthly stats email you can turn off.
• Order data from PayPal: the transaction ID, amount, status, and the payer's name and email that PayPal sends us. We use the payer name for the name match described on For captains and store payer emails as hashes in our payment records.
• Listing content you write and photos you upload. We remove photo location and camera data (EXIF) when we save a photo.
• IP addresses only as salted hashes, used for rate limits, report counts and daily view counts. We don't keep raw IP addresses in our records.
• Counts only for listing stats: views, call-button taps and website clicks per listing per day. We keep no visitor-level rows.

State lists

• We republish the Ohio Division of Wildlife's public list of licensed Lake Erie fishing guides as ODNR publishes it (names, business names, phone numbers, guide types). Guides chose to be listed on their ODNR application. Where a guide entered a street address as a business name, we don't show it.
• We download the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission's permitted charter/guide report only to check Pennsylvania listings. We don't publish its rows and don't store its addresses.
• Anyone named in an Ohio entry can remove it from our site, free and within a minute of confirming (how). A removal is stored as a one-way hash, not as your name, so it survives every update of ODNR's list.

Cookies and tracking

One session cookie, used for sign-in and form security. No analytics scripts, tracking cookies, tag managers, social-media widgets, maps or third-party fonts. The only outside script is the adengine.us banner ad described under Advertising; it sets no cookies.

Advertising

Some pages show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. The banner is separate from the paid Featured and Dockside spots described on What's paid.

It sits below the page content on the home page, the port pages and port list, the captain lists (by state and Ohio A–Z), the guides and sources, the four tools, About, Help and Safety. It never appears on a captain's own page, search results, sign-in, listing, claim, removal, report, checkout, order or download pages, the Captain's Kit, For captains, Pricing, Dockside, Terms, Privacy, Refunds, What's paid or Legal, and it is left out when a page is printed.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.

Who sees your data

PayPal processes payments under its own privacy policy. Our servers send email from our own domain. We don't sell, rent or share personal information for marketing.

How long we keep it

• Order and payment records (item, amount, date, PayPal transaction ID, name-match result): 7 years.
• Raw PayPal payment notifications: deleted after about 400 days; payer names and emails anywhere else in our records are redacted after 18 months.
• Email logs: 180 days.
• Sign-in links and download links: until they expire.
• Deleted listings: content erased at once; the payment record stays.

Your choices

Unsubscribe from stats and reminder emails with the link in each one. Delete your listing from your dashboard. Remove or restore your Ohio entry yourself.

Contact

legal@lakeerie.biz