America Wire writes about consumer technology, repairs, buying decisions, online fraud and privacy. A site that lectures readers about privacy has an obligation to be precise about its own, so this page is more detailed than most. It was last updated on 28 September 2026.

Practising what we write about

We cover scams and tracking on this site, so it is fair to ask what we do ourselves.

We will never send you an unsolicited message. We have no newsletter, no push notifications, and no reader accounts, which means there is no America Wire email, text or alert that you did not ask for. Anything that arrives claiming to be from us and asking you to click, log in, verify or pay is a forgery. Send it to [email protected] and we will write about it.

We will never ask you for a password. Not for your email, not for a device, not for anything. There is no situation in which this site legitimately needs one.

We do not embed social media tracking widgets, which are one of the most common ways a page reports your visit to a company you have no relationship with.

The one thing we cannot avoid is advertising, because it pays for the site, and advertising brings third party cookies with it. That is described above and it is the honest limit of what we control.

If you write to us about a scam

Readers forward us fraudulent messages, and those forwards often contain their own phone number, email address or account details in the quoted text. We use them to understand the scam and nothing else, and we remove every identifying detail before referring to a case in an article.

If you have actually lost money, report it to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov. We cannot recover funds and we cannot investigate on your behalf.

What this site collects automatically

Every time a page is requested, our web server records the request. That log contains the IP address the request came from, the date and time, the page requested, the referring page if there was one, and the browser and operating system reported by your device.

This is standard server logging. We use it to see which articles are read, to diagnose errors, and to identify automated abuse. We keep these logs for 30 days and then they are deleted.

Traffic to America Wire passes through Cloudflare, which acts as a content delivery network and blocks malicious requests before they reach us. Cloudflare processes your IP address in order to do that, and sets a cookie used to distinguish genuine visitors from automated traffic. Cloudflare’s own privacy policy is at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to store. America Wire uses them for three things and nothing else.

Making the site work. Remembering your cookie consent choice so you are not asked repeatedly, and allowing our caching system to serve pages quickly.

Comments. If you leave a comment and tick the box to be remembered, your name, email address and website are stored in a cookie on your own device so you do not have to type them again. That cookie lasts one year. If you do not tick the box, no comment cookie is set.

Advertising and measurement. Described in the next section.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. The site will still work. You will be asked for your consent choice more often, because the record of your last answer is itself stored in a cookie.

Advertising

America Wire is paid for by advertising. We have no subscription and we do not charge readers.

Advertising on this site is sold through third party advertising networks rather than by us directly. Those networks, and the companies they work with, may set cookies or similar identifiers in your browser, and may use them to choose which advertisements to show you, to limit how often you see the same one, and to measure whether an advertisement was seen.

Google is among the companies that may serve advertising here. Google’s use of advertising cookies is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and you can manage Google’s advertising personalisation at adssettings.google.com.

We do not control what these companies collect and we do not receive your personal details from them. What we receive is aggregate reporting: how many advertisements were shown, on which pages, and what they earned.

Analytics

We use analytics to see which articles people read, how they arrived, and roughly where in the world they are. This is reported to us as totals and patterns. We do not attempt to identify individual readers from it, and we do not sell reader data to anyone.

Comments

Comments are open on articles. When you leave one we collect what you type into the form, which is your name, your email address, your website if you choose to give one, and the comment itself. We also record your IP address and your browser’s user agent string, which is how automated spam is identified.

Your name, your comment and your website link are published. Your email address and your IP address are not published and are visible only to us.

An anonymised string derived from your email address, called a hash, may be sent to the Gravatar service to check whether you have a profile picture there. Gravatar’s privacy policy is at automattic.com/privacy.

Comments and their associated data are kept for as long as the article is published, so that follow up comments from the same person can be recognised. You can ask us to delete yours at any time.

What we do not do

We do not require you to create an account. Registration is closed and there are no reader accounts on America Wire.

We do not operate a newsletter and we do not have a mailing list, so there is nothing to unsubscribe from.

We do not ask for and do not want your date of birth, your address, your telephone number, your financial details or any government identifier. If a page on this site ever asks you for those, it is not us and you should tell us at [email protected].

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with anyone except as described in this policy.

Email you send us

If you write to [email protected] we keep your message and your address so that we can answer you and so that we have a record if the matter comes up again. We delete correspondence on request.

Your choices and your rights

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you are shown a consent notice before any non essential cookie is set, and you can change that answer at any time using the link in the footer of every page. You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, and to object to processing.

If you are a California resident, you have the right under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended to know what categories of personal information are collected, to request deletion, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information as those terms are defined in that law. Use the footer link, or write to [email protected].

Your browser may also send a Global Privacy Control signal. Where it does, we treat that as an opt out request.

We will answer any of these requests within 30 days. We will not charge you and we will not treat you differently for asking.

Children

America Wire is written for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Security

The whole site is served over an encrypted connection. Access to the systems behind it is limited to the people who run it. No arrangement is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise, but we hold very little about any individual reader in the first place, which is the most effective protection there is.

Links to other sites

We link out to source documents, agency pages and other publications. Once you follow a link you are on somebody else’s website under somebody else’s policy, and we have no control over what they collect.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle any of this, we will update this page and change the date at the top, and where the change matters we will say what it was rather than quietly rewriting.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or any request about your own data, go to [email protected]. A person reads that address.