Privacy Policy
Last updated August 2026. This page explains what The Lottery Manual collects, why, and how you can control or remove it. If anything here is unclear, contact us.
What we collect
If you create an account, we store:
- Your email address and password (the password is hashed — we never store it in plain text)
- Your display name, and optionally a bio, forum signature, and avatar image you choose to upload
- Forum posts, topics, private messages, and saved "My Numbers" picks you create while using the site
Whether or not you have an account, we log anonymous page views (the URL path and browser user agent only — never your IP address) to understand what's popular and to tell human visitors from search-engine crawlers. These are kept for 90 days and are never tied to an individual account.
If you use the Contact page, we store the name, email, and message you submit so we can respond to it.
Cookies and local storage
Signing in sets one cookie: a secure, HttpOnly session cookie that keeps you logged in for up to 14 days. We don't use it for advertising or cross-site tracking, and we run no third-party analytics trackers — our page-view counts are the anonymous ones described above. Your light/dark theme choice and any in-progress forum post draft are saved in your browser's local storage only — they're never sent to our servers. Advertising cookies set by Google are covered in the next section.
Advertising
Some pages carry a single advertisement served by Google AdSense. Ads never appear on the sign-in, registration, account, or donate pages, or on your private messages.
Google is a third-party vendor and uses cookies to serve those ads. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites. This is Google's processing, not ours: we never send Google your email address, account details, forum activity, or saved picks, and we receive only aggregate earnings figures in return — never information about an individual visitor.
You can turn off personalised advertising in Google's My Ad Center, and read how Google uses data from sites that run its ads at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser, or using an ad blocker, doesn't affect any other part of this site — everything except the ad itself works exactly the same.
How we use your data
To run the site: authenticating you, displaying your forum activity, matching your saved picks against new draws to notify you, and — if you use the password-reset flow — emailing you a reset link. We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with third parties except where necessary to operate the site (our database and hosting providers, and the advertising vendor described above).
If you use the header's Donate button, it takes you to PayPal's own site to complete the donation — we never see or store your payment details, and PayPal's use of your information is governed by PayPal's own privacy policy, not this one.
Your controls
From Account Settings you can change your password or email at any time, and delete your account entirely. Deleting your account removes your personal details (email, bio, avatar) and permanently disables sign-in; forum posts you've made stay visible so replies from other members still make sense, but are re-attributed to "Deleted User" rather than your name.
Children's privacy
The Lottery Manual isn't directed at children and isn't knowingly used to collect data from anyone under 13.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the update.