Actually, Hastings Research doesn't have a written "privacy policy." What we do have is a track record of privacy. We've never sold or shared any information on a customer – since long before the Web existed – and we have no plans to change that. We're in the research and publishing business, period. (Comes to that, we don't collect much information either. Nor do we know your credit card number; Digibuy and PayPal don't give them to us, and we don't want them – it's just a security headache.)

Privacy policies usually end up with some sort of disclaimer saying, "... of course, who knows what our affiliates are up to." We have only two "affiliates" – Digibuy and Paypal, the companies that actually process the credit card orders. We checked them out fairly thoroughly before deciding to use their service, and we're fairly confident that they don't sell or share information either. We have no affiliation whatsoever with any of the Web data-gathering companies.

Spamming: We never have, and we don't have any expectation of starting now.