What this site keeps about you

• The wire and Counterparty Watch need no account and no email; there are no analytics services, no tracking cookies and no third-party fonts. Pages load only from this site, except the one labelled banner ad from adengine.us described under Advertising (its tag also counts one page view per page, as a daily total). Counterparty Watch pages load nothing from other sites.
• Watch lists store the list's name, the companies and states on it, and when it was last opened. The list's code is stored only as a SHA-256 fingerprint, so the site cannot rebuild your link. A list not opened for 400 days is deleted with everything on it; you can delete one at any time from its page.
• Cookies: only the security token on pages with a form (it stops other sites from sending forms in your name), and on the Liquidation Market’s sign-in, selling, account and practice-auction pages the strictly necessary cookies described below.
• Abuse limits count requests per address per day; addresses are stored only as a salted hash and the counts are deleted after two days.
• Server logs (the web server's own access log) are kept by the host for routine operation and are not shared or sold.
• The wire itself is public information about companies and banks from public records, not about visitors.

There are no tracking cookies, and nothing about you is sold to anyone.

Liquidation Market (added 27 October 2026)

The Liquidation Market is in preview. While it is, the only personal data it stores is a founding-seller reservation you choose to make (name, email, business type, categories, state and approximate lot count), plus the play bids of the practice auction, which are tied to a random session id and deleted within the hour of your last play bid. Looking at the practice auction stores nothing; only a play bid starts its session. When selling opens, accounts work like this:

• What is collected: your email and a password hash (argon2id; we cannot read the password), your age and terms confirmations, your verification steps and their dates; for sellers, the seller name and type, payment instructions you give buyers, and the legal name, address and phone kept for the INFORM Consumers Act (encrypted at rest); lots, bids, sales, messages, disputes and reports; and, for fraud and linked-account checks, salted fingerprints of your internet address, device cookie, payment email, phone and addresses (not the values themselves).
• Cookies (strictly necessary, Market sign-in pages only): __Host-ln_sess keeps you signed in (it is also set by your first play bid in the practice auction, and lasts up to 14 days), and __Host-ln_dev is a random device id, set only when you sign in or create an account, used only to spot accounts that belong together (it lasts a year). The /market pages that need no sign-in, the home page and the wire set no cookie.
• Who sees what: buyers see a seller’s name, badge and city; a paying buyer sees the pickup address. Public bid history shows masked bidders (“Bidder 3”), never names. INFORM rules require showing a high-volume seller’s name, address and contact details to buyers once sales pass $20,000 a year.
• Retention: sale, fee and moderation records are kept for 7 years for tax and dispute purposes and then deleted; photos of lots sold more than 90 days ago are reduced to one; practice-auction data is deleted within the hour of the last play bid; fingerprints of internet addresses are deleted after 30 days; the log of emails the Market would have sent keeps only a fingerprint of the address, not the address, and is deleted after 14 days; reservations are kept until we contact you after selling opens and are deleted 90 days after selling opens, or sooner with your private link. You can close your account at any time on your account page: your email address and password are erased at once, and the records above stay only for the periods given.
• No selling of data. Market data is not sold or shared for advertising. Payment processors (PayPal) receive only what a payment needs.
• Security breaches: if personal information is acquired without authorisation, affected people are notified as Ohio law requires (R.C. 1349.19) and as the law of their state requires.
• California (CalOPPA): this page lists what is collected and who it is shared with; the site does not respond to browser “Do Not Track” signals because it does no cross-site tracking at all; changes to this policy are dated on this page. To review or correct your information, or to close your account, use your account page or the Market contact page.

Advertising

The public pages (home, the wire, filing and company pages, bank failures, the tally, the field guide, pricing and sources) 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; no company on the wire pays for them and they never change what the wire shows. Counterparty Watch (its start page and your lists), this page and the terms never show an ad, and the ad is left out when a page is printed. (Added 17 October 2026.)

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 internet (IP) address, your browser type and the address of this site (not the page) 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.