Privacy

The Ready Check and “It’s missing now”

These pages store nothing about you. They are the same for everyone. The banner ad on them is described under Advertising.

Plans

A plan is opened by a private link of 32 letters and numbers. Lost Hour stores a one-way fingerprint (SHA-256) of that link, never the link itself, and the plan’s content (plan name and devices: nickname, kind, model, serial, IMEI, carrier, carrier phone, the account label you type, notes and ticks) encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key made from your link and a server key. Someone who copies the database alone can’t read a plan without its link, and a lost link can’t be recovered.

What this does not protect against: opening a plan puts its private link in the address, and the web server’s access logs record addresses. The server key is on the same server. So someone with administrator access to the server could open a plan whose link appears in those logs. Lost Hour’s operator does not do this, but you should know it is possible; that is one more reason not to put passwords or PINs in a plan.

Please don’t type passwords or PINs into a plan; the forms refuse text that looks like one.

Other things kept

• To limit abuse, a salted hash of your network address is counted for one or two days when you start a plan.
• The web server keeps standard access logs (address, time, page) for security. Private plan addresses can appear in those logs.
• Encrypted plans are included in the nightly database backups (the newest 14 are kept) and in backups taken when the site is updated.
• Plans not opened or changed for 400 days are deleted. You can delete yours at any time from the plan page.

No cookies are used except the security cookie that protects forms; the banner ad sets none. There are no analytics services and no fonts from other sites. The only script from another site is the adengine.us banner ad on the public pages, described below; it counts one page view per page as a daily total.

Advertising

Since 17 October 2026 the public pages of this site (home, Pricing, About, the Ready Check and “It’s missing now” pages) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind Lost Hour. For now the ads are for WeldonPC’s own services. Plan pages, the start-a-plan form, this page, the terms and error pages show no ad and load nothing from adengine.us.

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 network address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests: the site’s address only, never the page’s.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your network address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your 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 (network 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.

Questions: weldon@weldonpc.com.