Privacy policy

Best HVAC Schools has no accounts, no logins and no forms. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing here asks who you are, so there is no point at which you hand over a name, an email address or a phone number.

We do not sell, rent or share personal information. We do not build profiles of visitors, we do not run advertising networks, and we do not embed social media trackers, comment systems, chat widgets, heat maps or session recorders.

If you email us, we have your address and whatever you put in the message, for as long as it takes to answer you. That is the only personal information this site is ever likely to hold about you, and you chose to send it.

We measure traffic with Google Analytics. It reports aggregate figures such as page views, which pages are read to the end, approximate location by country or region, and which site you arrived from. It sets its own cookies to do that.

We use it to decide what to write next, not to work out who you are. Google is a separate company processing that data under its own privacy policy and its own terms. Blocking analytics scripts in your browser, or with an extension, will not stop any part of this site working.

Beyond that, the only thing stored in your browser is your light or dark theme choice, kept in local storage under the key "theme" so the site does not flash the wrong colour scheme on your next visit. It never leaves your device and clearing your browser data removes it.

The site is served by Cloudflare Workers. As with any web host, delivering a page involves your IP address in transit along with standard request information such as the page requested and your browser type.

We keep no analytics database of our own and receive no log of who visited what. That infrastructure is handled by Cloudflare under its own privacy terms.

This site links out heavily and on purpose. Every school card links to that school's own program page, every licensing claim links to the state board, statute or municipal code it came from, and every wage figure links to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Once you follow one of those links you are on somebody else's site, under their privacy policy rather than this one, and we have no control over what they collect. Outbound links carry rel="noopener" so the destination cannot manipulate the page you came from.

Some links on this site are paid, and we may earn a commission when you use one. That never costs you anything extra, and paid placements are labelled where they appear.

Payment does not buy ranking. The order of schools on the ranking and state pages is computed from public federal data and published accreditation records, using the five factors set out on the about page. No school can pay to move up it, and none has been asked to.

This site is written for adults and older teenagers choosing trade training, and a number of the programs it lists are taught in high schools. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Nothing here asks a reader for identifying information at any age.

Under the GDPR in the UK and EU, and the CCPA in California, you have the right to know what personal data an organisation holds about you, to have it corrected, and to have it deleted. Those rights apply to us as to anyone.

In practice we hold no personal data to hand over, because analytics figures are aggregate and are not tied to a name. Requests about the Google Analytics data itself go to Google, which holds it. If you have emailed us and want that correspondence deleted, write to help@hakia.com and it will be deleted.

This sits outside privacy proper, but people ask about it in the same breath. This site publishes figures about schools and about state licensing rules, all of it from public sources and all of it linked.

If something here disagrees with your program's own records, or a licensing rule has changed since we verified it, write to help@hakia.com and it will be checked against the source. Every state page carries the date its licensing research was verified.

If this site ever starts collecting something beyond traffic measurement, this page will say so and the date below will change. There is no mailing list to announce it to, so that date is the honest signal.

Questions about this policy, or about anything published on besthvacschools.com, go to help@hakia.com.