Privacy

What this site collects, what is optional, and how to change your mind.

What One Dollar Ask is

One Dollar Ask is a personal internet experiment run by one individual, asking a single question: would you voluntarily send a stranger one dollar? It is not a company product, not a charity, not a fundraiser for a cause, and not an investment. You receive nothing in return except being part of the experiment.

The site is deliberately small. There are no accounts, no logins, and no advertising. The one thing you can sign up for is an occasional email about how the experiment turns out, and only if you ask for it — see Updates by email below.

Who is responsible

This site is operated under the name One Dollar Ask. It is a personal experiment run by a private individual in Switzerland — not a company, not an organisation, and not a charity.

Who to contact

For anything on this page — questions, a request to see or delete data, or a complaint — write to hello@onedollarask.com. That address reaches the person responsible for this site directly, and it is the fastest way to get an answer.

Payments are handled by PayPal

Voluntary payments are processed by PayPal. Payment happens on PayPal's own checkout pages, not on this site. PayPal collects and processes your payment details, account details and payment-method data under its own privacy policy and as its own data controller — One Dollar Ask has no part in that and never sees your card or bank details.

After a payment, PayPal sends you back to the thank-you page with a transaction reference in the address. That reference is checked with PayPal server-side to confirm the payment is real, and is then removed from the address so it is not carried into analytics. What is kept about a payment is:

• the PayPal transaction id, its status and type
• the amount, the currency, PayPal's fee and the net amount
• the payment date and the receiving account
• the campaign tags described below

This record exists so that a payment is verified once and never counted twice. It does not contain your name, your email address or any payment-method details.

Google Analytics — only after you accept

This site can use Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager. It is off by default. Nothing is loaded from Google and no analytics cookie is set unless you actively choose Accept analytics. If you reject, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are never loaded at all. Your choice does not affect anything else on this site, and it has nothing to do with whether a payment works.

If you accept, the following can be processed by Google on our behalf:

• pages you view on this site and when
• an approximate location, derived by Google from your IP address; Google Analytics does not store the IP address itself
• device, browser and language
• the page or campaign you arrived from
• clicks on the payment links and the contact link (click_pay_1, click_pay_custom, click_contact)
• after a payment that has been verified with PayPal, a purchase event with the transaction id, the amount and the currency
• the pseudonymous identifiers Google Analytics stores in its own cookies (_ga, _ga_K8E9BL0H8X)

This is used only to count visits and see which links work. Advertising and personalisation signals are switched off, and the data is not used to build advertising profiles or sold to anyone. Google Analytics is operated by Google, which may process this data outside your country, including in the United States.

The purchase event is sent from a Cloudflare Worker rather than from your browser, so that only payments PayPal has actually confirmed are counted. That event is sent only when analytics consent was granted. If you rejected analytics, your payment is still verified and still counted in the project's own private totals, but nothing about it is sent to Google.

Updates by email — only if you ask for them

You can leave your email address to hear how the experiment turns out. This is entirely optional. Nothing is collected unless you type your address in, tick the box and submit it, and you can read the whole site and make a payment without ever doing so.

• What is collected: your email address, the time you signed up and the time you confirmed. Brevo also keeps a record of that confirmation, as evidence that you asked to be on the list.
• What it is used for: occasional emails about the experiment and what it produces. Nothing else. Your address is never sold, rented or passed on.
• On what basis: your consent. You give it by ticking the box and then confirming from your own mailbox, and you can withdraw it at any time.
• Who processes it: Brevo, the trading name of Sendinblue SAS in France, which runs the mailing list on our instructions as a processor. Your address is handled in the EU.

Emails are tracked, and this is worth stating plainly. Brevo records whether you opened an email and which links you clicked, individually rather than as a total. That is information about you, and it is separate from the analytics choice on this site: rejecting analytics here does not switch off tracking inside emails you subscribed to. If you would rather not be measured that way, do not subscribe, or unsubscribe later.

How long: until you unsubscribe. One honest complication: after an unsubscribe your address is kept on a suppression list, precisely so that it can never be mailed again by accident. That entry cannot be deleted without losing that protection, so an unsubscribe removes you from the list but leaves that single record behind.

The list and the payments are kept apart. No attempt is made to connect a subscriber to a payment, and the email list is not joined to the payment records described above.

Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and Gmail and similar clients show their own unsubscribe button for these emails. You can also write to hello@onedollarask.com to ask what is held about you, or to have it deleted.

This is a separate decision from the analytics choice below. Rejecting analytics does not stop you subscribing, and subscribing does not switch analytics on.

Campaign attribution (UTM and ref)

Links to this site sometimes carry campaign tags: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content and ref. They say which email, post or link brought you here — for example that you came from a specific test email rather than from a search.

These tags are read from the address, saved in your browser (see below) and attached to the payment record so the experiment can tell which link actually led to a payment. They are sent to Google Analytics only if you accepted analytics. They contain no information about you personally.

What is stored in your browser

This site uses localStorage — data kept on your own device, which is never automatically sent anywhere. It is used for two things:

• oda_utm_source, oda_utm_medium, oda_utm_campaign, oda_utm_term, oda_utm_content, oda_ref — the campaign tags above, so attribution survives the trip to PayPal and back.
• oda_consent_v1 — your analytics choice, so you are not asked again on every page. The v1 is a version: if this notice changes materially the version is raised, the old choice stops counting, and you are asked again.

Cookies are set only by Google Analytics, and only after you accept. Rejecting or resetting your choice below also deletes those cookies from this browser.

Your analytics choice

Analytics is off until you accept.

Accept analytics Reject analytics Reset my choice

Your choice is stored only in this browser, on this device. Reject switches analytics off and deletes the Google Analytics cookies. Reset forgets the choice entirely, so the banner asks you again next time. Clearing your browser data has the same effect as a reset.

Hosting

The site and the payment-verification service run on Cloudflare. To deliver the pages and keep them available, Cloudflare processes the technical details of each request, including your IP address, under its own security and delivery role. One Dollar Ask does not receive or store Cloudflare's raw request logs.

How long things are kept

• Payment verification records, so the same payment can never be counted twice: 24 months from the date of the payment. Later corrections to a record do not extend that.
• Analytics data, if you accepted analytics, kept by Google Analytics: 14 months.
• Your analytics choice and the campaign tags, in your own browser: until you clear your browser data, or reset your choice using the control above.

Your rights

You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, and object to how it is used, by writing to hello@onedollarask.com. You can withdraw analytics consent at any time using the control above — withdrawing is exactly as easy as accepting, and has no other consequence.

Payment data held by PayPal has to be requested from PayPal directly, because PayPal holds it as its own controller.

You also have the right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority. In Switzerland that is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC / EDÖB) in Bern. If you are in the EU or the UK, you can instead contact the supervisory authority where you live.

Changes to this notice

If this notice changes in a way that affects what is collected, the consent version is raised and you will be asked for your choice again.

Last updated: 17 September 2026 · consent version v1