LinkShare privacy
What the LinkShare box does and does not collect, how long records are kept, and what LinkShare receives from NOSA. This is a working draft that describes how the system is designed.
Draft — pending legal review; not yet in force
This draft has not been reviewed or approved by counsel. It describes the intended design of a service that is still in development and is not yet accepting members. It creates no commitments until it is approved and published.
Draft version: privacy-2026-10-draft-1
What the LinkShare box does not do
The box is a small script that a member adds to a website they own. It is designed to collect as little as possible.
- It sets no cookies and writes nothing to local storage.
- Its requests to LinkShare omit credentials and send no referrer, so no cookie from the host website or from NOSA travels with them.
- It assigns no visitor identifier and builds no visitor profile.
- It does not send the page address. Each box carries a public installation ID, and that ID is the only thing that says which website a view or click came from.
- It does not fingerprint browsers, record sessions, load advertising pixels, or read anything about the host website's customers, carts or orders.
What is measured
LinkShare counts a view only after at least half of the box has been visible for one second. It records a click on an outbound link with a best-effort background request, so a blocked or failed request means the click is not counted. The link still works.
These are approximate counts, not unique people and not purchases. Reports call them "qualified views" and "observed outbound clicks" for that reason, and no payment or credit is calculated from them.
How long records are kept
LinkShare does not persist IP addresses. They are used transiently for rate limiting and are not written to its database.
- Security diagnostics: up to 7 days, with identifying detail redacted.
- Raw event records used to process views and clicks: up to 7 days.
- Aggregate daily metrics: 13 months.
- Audit records of administrative and membership actions: 12 months.
Hosting platform logs
Pending: Retention of operational logs kept by the hosting platform has not yet been documented. To be completed by NOSA counsel.
Consent and cookies
Consent requirements differ by market and are reviewed for each market where LinkShare is offered. The absence of cookies is not presented as an exemption from every consent or notice requirement, and a member who displays the box remains responsible for their own site's notices.
What LinkShare receives from NOSA
LinkShare reads from NOSA through a narrow, versioned private interface and keeps its own database. The data it receives is an allowlist: a member identifier, a display name, a public profile link, account status, whether the membership is eligible, the member's selling categories, and revision and check times.
LinkShare never receives street addresses, dates of birth, health-benefit identifiers, payment or Stripe identifiers, or private contact details, and it keeps no separate password for members.
Who is responsible, and your rights
Pending: The responsible legal entity, how to contact it, how to exercise access or deletion rights, and the relationship to the NOSA privacy policy have not been written. To be completed by NOSA counsel.
Changes to this statement
Each version has an identifier. A change to the text creates a new identifier, and enrollment records which version a member accepted.