Privacy Policy

Who we are

This website, stoneagesoftware.com, is operated by Stone Age Software LLC ("we", "us"), a Texas limited liability company based in Houston, Texas. This policy covers information we handle through this website and through the email we send. Questions or requests about it go to msco@stoneagesoftware.com.

Information you send us

When you use our contact form, we receive what you type: your name, email address, and message, plus — if you choose to provide them — your company, phone number, and the service you're interested in. We store this in our systems and it is emailed to our inbox so we can respond.

When you sign up for one of our promotions at /promotions, we receive your name, email address and phone number, and which promotion you signed up for. We store them with the promotion and email them to our inbox, the way we handle a contact-form submission, so we can contact you to arrange the offer.

A submission also carries technical details of the request — your IP address, browser type, and the page that referred you. These accompany the notification email we send ourselves, where they help us tell genuine inquiries from spam.

When you email us, your message — its headers, text and attachments — is stored in our own mail system as well as at our email provider, so we can read, search and answer it in one place and file it with the work it belongs to. It is kept as an ordinary business record, and when we delete a message it is removed from our system within 30 days. Pictures embedded in your email from other websites are not loaded unless we choose to load them, and then only through our own server, so the sender of those pictures does not learn when your message was read.

Our internal mail tools can also connect to mailboxes we hold at Google or Microsoft, with our permission given through their sign-in. Mail read that way is used only to show, search, send and organize our own correspondence; it is never used for advertising, never sold, and never reviewed by anyone outside our company. Our use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

If your company is a client and you join our help desk at /support, we store the name, work email and password you give us (the password only as a salted hash), the company your invite belongs to, and everything written on your tickets: the subject, the details, your replies and ours. Tickets are visible to you, to colleagues your company has made managers of its help desk, and to our engineers. New tickets and our replies are also sent to the email addresses involved. Accounts are opened only with a company code or invite link we issued; we record which invite opened each account, and we count sign-in attempts to slow down guessing.

Information collected automatically

• Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used (pages visited, approximate location, device type). Google Analytics sets cookies and processes data under Google's privacy policy. You can opt out with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on or by blocking cookies. Through these tags, Google may collect information about your activity over time and across other websites, as described in its policy. If we run advertising campaigns, the same tag may also perform Google Ads conversion measurement, which sets its own cookies.
• Leadfeeder (Dealfront). We use Leadfeeder, a service of Dealfront Group GmbH, to identify the companies that visit this site. It receives your IP address along with the pages you view and the site that referred you, and looks the IP address up against a database of business networks. It is aimed at telling us which businesses have looked at us, not which people; where it cannot match a business network, the visit is discarded. Dealfront describes its handling in its privacy policy, which also carries its opt-out.
• Company identification (our own). When a page loads, our server looks up the network your connection comes from in free IP databases kept on our server (MaxMind GeoLite2 and IPinfo Lite), to tell whether it belongs to an organization — a company, school or agency that runs its own network — or to an internet provider. For an internet provider's address it may also ask the regional internet registry (ARIN, or the registry for your region) whether that block is registered to a business. If the network is an organization's, we record the organization's name and the pages viewed from it, how far they were read and for how long; for any other network we keep only a daily count of how many visits came from that kind of network. We never store your IP address: what we keep is the address with its last part removed (for example 203.0.113.0/24), deleted after 13 months. The organization's name, and its web domain when the data names it, are also sent to Google Analytics with your visit. IPinfo is asked about a network's address, never yours, and a registry receives your address with its last three bits removed. The answer is kept in your browser's session storage until you close the tab. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, none of this runs.
• Reading suggestions on the blog (our own). The articles under “Further reading” at the foot of a blog post, and the “Picked for you” row on the blog's front page, are chosen in your browser from a note it keeps of which of the blog's topics you have read here and for roughly how long. That note lives in your browser's local storage, is never sent to us or to anyone else, and goes when you clear the site's data. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, no note is kept and the suggestions follow the article's own topic alone.
• reCAPTCHA. Our contact form and promotion sign-ups are protected by Google reCAPTCHA, which collects hardware and software information from your browser and device and sends it to Google to distinguish people from automated submissions. Its use is subject to Google's privacy policy and terms of service.
• Server logs. Like most websites, our server may keep routine technical logs (IP address, URL requested, time) for security and troubleshooting.

Our fonts are served from our own server rather than a font network, so loading a page here does not, by itself, announce your visit to a third party beyond the services named above.

Cookies

We set a session cookie that is strictly necessary for the site to work — it carries messages between pages, such as a notice that a form needs another look. Google Analytics, reCAPTCHA and Leadfeeder set their own cookies or equivalent browser storage as described above, Microsoft's Office viewer may set its own when it displays a document we share with you (below), and pages in our staff-only admin area (including its sign-in page) additionally load Google Tag Manager. We do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals, but you can block or delete cookies in your browser settings at any time.

Our business outreach email

We sometimes send business-to-business email introducing our services. The recipient details we use — a name, business email address, phone number, and company information — come from publicly available sources such as company websites and business directories, or from business contact lists we compile. Deciding who to write to means our systems evaluate many businesses they never contact, and the public contact details found along the way are stored as well. Every message we send identifies Stone Age Software LLC, includes our postal address, and carries a one-click unsubscribe link.

If you reply, our system records the reply and scans it automatically so that opt-out requests and undeliverable addresses are honored without delay.

If you unsubscribe, the removal is permanent: we keep your address on a suppression list used solely to make sure we never email you again, and no future campaign can add you back. You can also email msco@stoneagesoftware.com to be added to that list proactively.

Documents we share with you

When we send you a private link to a document — a proposal, a contract, a deck — the page it opens loads no analytics or advertising tags, is never indexed by search engines, and stops working when the link expires or we revoke it. We count how many times a link is opened, not who opened it. PDFs and images are displayed by our own viewer and are not sent to anyone else. A Word or PowerPoint file is displayed by Microsoft's Office viewer inside that page: to show it, Microsoft's servers fetch a copy of the file through a separate address that expires within minutes and never reveals your link. That copy is handled under Microsoft's privacy statement.

How we use information

• To respond to your inquiries and provide our services.
• To understand how the site is used and improve it.
• To send business outreach as described above, and to honor opt-outs.
• To protect the site against spam and abuse, and to comply with law.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing. Information belonging to our clients is handled under a stricter standard, described on our confidentiality page.

When we share information

We share information only with the service providers that run our infrastructure — website hosting, email delivery and inbox hosting (which may include Google or Microsoft), Google for the analytics and spam-prevention described above, Dealfront for the visitor identification described above, IPinfo and the regional internet registries for the network lookups described above, and Microsoft to display the Word and PowerPoint files we share with you — and when the law requires it. If our business is ever sold or merged, information may transfer as part of that transaction under this policy's protections.

How long we keep it

Contact-form submissions and promotion sign-ups are kept as ordinary business records for as long as we need them to serve you and meet our obligations. Page views recorded for an organization's network are deleted after 13 months. Unsubscribe requests are kept indefinitely, because that is what makes the opt-out permanent. You can ask us to delete information we hold about you at any time.

Your choices and rights

Email msco@stoneagesoftware.com to ask what information we hold about you, or to have it corrected or deleted. We honor these requests regardless of where you live. Unsubscribe links in our email work without a login and take effect immediately.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, and access to stored information is restricted to the people who need it. Our security practices are organized around the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to protect what you share with us.

Children

This site is for businesses and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes to this policy

If our practices change, we will update this page and revise the effective date above.

Contact

Stone Age Software LLC
Houston, Texas
msco@stoneagesoftware.com
832-598-8234