We read water reports. We don't harvest people.

Affiliate links and commissions

Some links on this site go to retailers such as Amazon. If you buy something through one, we earn a commission from that retailer. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not change what you pay.

Two things worth knowing about how that works. Retailers use cookies to attribute a purchase to the site that referred you, so clicking an outbound link may set a cookie controlled by the retailer, governed by their privacy policy rather than ours. And we never receive your name, address, payment details or order contents. What we see is an aggregate count of qualifying purchases, not who made them.

Our commission rate does not vary by product score. No water or filter manufacturer pays us anything, and none can buy a score, a placement, or a review.

What we collect

If you subscribe to lab notes, we keep your email address. If you write to us, we keep your message so we can answer it. That's the list. We don't run advertising trackers, and we don't buy or append data about you from anyone.

What we do with it

Emails on the lab-notes list get one email a month. Contact messages get a reply. We use privacy-respecting analytics to count page visits in aggregate, with no individual profiles.

What we never do

We never sell, rent, or trade your information. We never share it with water or filter brands. A company built on independence from brands would be a strange one to hand them your inbox.

Your choices

Every email we send has a working unsubscribe link. Want your data deleted entirely? Send a deletion request through the contact form and it's gone within 14 days, confirmed in writing.

Last updated August 2026