Privacy policy

The short version: there are no accounts, we do not ask for your name or email to use anything on this site, and your practice history never leaves your own browser.

What we do not collect

• No accounts, sign-ups or logins. Every tool here works without identifying yourself.
• No email address, name, phone number or postal address is requested or stored.
• No exam results are transmitted to us. We do not know how you scored.

Your practice history stays on your device

The missed-question notebook remembers which questions you got wrong so it can hand them back to you later. That record is written to your browser's local storage, under a single key, on your own device. It is never uploaded, it is not tied to any identifier, and we cannot read it.

The practical consequences, both directions: it does not follow you to another phone or computer, and clearing your browser's site data deletes it. There is also a clear the notebook button on the page itself.

Analytics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see which pages get read. It is cookieless: it sets no cookie, uses no client-side state, and does not fingerprint or track visitors across sites. It reports aggregate figures such as page views, referrers and country. We cannot use it to identify you.

Counting practice runs

Separately from that, we keep a small tally of how the practice tools get used, because page views alone cannot tell us whether the exam simulator is any good. When a run starts and when it finishes, the site adds one to a daily total on our own server. The events counted are: a full exam started or finished, a section drill started or finished, a notebook run started or finished, the notebook being cleared, and reaching the end of a study guide.

What gets stored is a running count per day, like "14 August: exam_complete, 6". There is no row per visit. That is a deliberate design choice rather than a promise about how we behave, and it means the following are not merely unused but never recorded at all:

• No IP address, and no user agent or device information.
• No session or visitor identifier, so runs cannot be linked to each other or to you.
• No time of day. The finest resolution stored is the calendar day.
• No page URL beyond a coarse grouping such as "study" or "practice".
• No score. We are told a run finished, never how it went. The statement above that we do not know how you scored stays literally true.

Nothing is written to your device for this, so there is no cookie to consent to and nothing to clear. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, the site sends none of these counts at all.

Advertising

No advertisements are displayed on this site yet. Google's AdSense script does load on every page, because the site is going through Google's review process, but no ad units are rendered and nothing is being sold against these pages today. When advertising does begin, the following applies, and it is stated now so the position is clear in advance:

• Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
• You can also opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info and the Network Advertising Initiative.

Because Google's script is present, Google may set cookies as described above even while no ads are shown. The opt-out links apply from now, not only from the day ads appear.

Job listings on the salary pages

No job listings are shown on this site yet. When they are, the metro salary pages will fetch current openings from Talroo, and doing so will send your IP address to Talroo because their API requires it for location and fraud checks. Nothing else about you would be sent, nothing would be stored on your device, and the request would be made by our server rather than by your browser. It is stated here in advance so the position is clear before anything changes.

Links to other sites

We link out to EPA, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and to the certifying organizations on the testing directory. We do not control those sites and this policy does not cover them. We are not paid by any certifying organization and the directory is ordered alphabetically, not by payment.

Children

This site is aimed at people entering or working in the HVACR trade. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them, which is straightforward here because we do not collect personal information from anyone.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. The most likely change is the advertising section switching tense once ads begin.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hello@hvacexamlab.com, or see the contact page.