Privacy policy

Who is responsible

Quackmark is published by DO Innovations SA, Chemin de Bon-Abri 26a, 1007 Lausanne, Switzerland, registered in the Commercial Register of the Canton of Vaud under CHE-202.940.145.

For anything on this page, including exercising your rights, write to hello@quackmark.com.

We process personal data in accordance with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, where it applies, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Cookies and your choice

The first time you arrive, Quackmark asks you what you are willing to allow. Until you answer, nothing outside the strictly necessary category runs: no advertising cookie, no tag, no pixel. Closing the banner is not consent, and Reject all is exactly as easy to press as Accept all.

Strictly necessary: always on

One entry in your browser's local storage, called qm-consent, holding the choice you made and the date you made it. It is read only by this site and never sent anywhere. Without it we would have to ask you again on every page. There is no legal basis needed for this one beyond the fact that you asked for the site.

Advertising: off unless you turn it on

If you allow it, we and our advertising partners may set cookies or read device identifiers to measure whether an advertisement was shown or clicked, and to select advertising that is relevant to you. Legal basis: your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a) and Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive as implemented locally; FADP Art. 31 in Switzerland). You can withdraw it at any moment, with the same two clicks it took to give.

To be concrete about what is running today: the sponsor slots you can see on this site are plain images and links served from our own domain, and they work perfectly well with advertising switched off. We intend to introduce Google Ads, which is why this consent mechanism exists and why it is built around Google's Consent Mode. Until Google Ads is actually live, allowing advertising causes nothing to be loaded. When it goes live, this page will say so and the version of the consent notice will be raised, which means you will be asked again rather than carried over on an old answer.

Changing your mind

Select Cookie settings in the footer of any page. Clearing your browser's site data for quackmark.com also resets it, and you will simply be asked again on your next visit.

What we still do not do

• No analytics. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no server-side page-view counting beyond ordinary hosting logs. If that ever changes, it becomes its own category in the banner with its own switch, and you will be asked afresh.
• No profile of you. We do not build, buy, enrich or sell audience profiles, and we do not attempt to identify individual visitors.
• No accounts, no newsletter, no contact form. There is nothing on this site to sign up for and nothing to submit. Your quiz answers are worked out in your browser and forgotten when you close the tab.
• Advertisers are told about the site, not about you. They are given aggregate figures for the site as a whole. They are never given your data by us.

What is collected anyway

Server logs. Like every website, Quackmark is served by a hosting provider that records ordinary technical data for each request: your IP address, the date and time, the page or file requested, the HTTP status, the referring page and your browser's user-agent string. We use these logs only to keep the site running, to diagnose faults and to defend against attacks and abuse.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating a secure and functioning website (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f); FADP Art. 31). Logs are kept for a short period, normally no longer than 90 days, and then deleted or anonymised by the hosting provider.

Email. If you write to us (about an advertising slot, a listing, or a mistake you have found), we keep your message and your address so we can reply and so we can keep a record of what was agreed. Legal basis: pre-contractual and contractual necessity, and our legitimate interest in answering correspondence.

Webfonts

None. The typefaces are served from this domain, like everything else.

Quackmark's fonts used to load from Google Fonts, which meant your browser fetched them from fonts.gstatic.com and transmitted your IP address to Google before you had chosen anything at all. They are now downloaded, stored in /assets/fonts/ and served from the same server as the rest of the site. No request leaves our infrastructure to render a page, and no third party learns that you visited.

Why we bothered: a German court held that embedding Google Fonts without consent can infringe a visitor's rights (LG München I, 20 January 2022, 3 O 17493/20). A site about intellectual property that had to be sued into tidying up its own dependencies would be a poor advertisement for itself.

As things stand, loading any page of this site contacts nobody but us. That is a statement about today, not a promise about every future version: if we ever serve something from another domain — an advertiser's image hosted on their own server, for instance — this section changes before that does.

Links out

Quackmark links to a lot of other places: IP offices, free databases, news sites, and the firms listed in the IP Pages. Once you follow a link, you are on someone else's site under someone else's privacy policy. We have no control over what they collect and no responsibility for it.

Paid links carry rel="sponsored" and a visible “Advertisement” label. Clicking one is an ordinary link click: we do not intercept it, count it or redirect it through a tracker.

Who else sees your data

Nobody, apart from:

• our hosting and email providers, who process data on our instructions under a contract;
• Google (Google Ireland Limited / Google LLC), only if you switch advertising on, for advertising delivery and measurement. With advertising off, nothing reaches them at all;
• authorities or courts, where we are legally obliged to disclose something.

We do not sell personal data, and we never will. Where data is processed outside Switzerland or the EEA, we rely on an adequacy decision or on standard contractual clauses.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us for access to the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to have its processing restricted, to receive it in a portable form, and to object to processing based on legitimate interests. Where processing rests on consent, you can withdraw that consent at any time without affecting what was lawful before.

Ask at hello@quackmark.com. In practice, for a visitor who has only read the site, the only thing we are likely to hold is a hosting log line, so please tell us roughly when you visited and from which IP address, or we will not be able to find anything.

If you think we have got it wrong, you can complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (edoeb.admin.ch) or, in the EU/EEA, to your local supervisory authority.

Children

Quackmark is written for adults and for students of intellectual property. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

If we change how this site handles data, for example when the fonts are self-hosted, we will change this page and update the date below. There is no mailing list to notify, by design.

Last updated: 13 August 2026.