What you enter
You can use PickMinded without an account. To find a Mac, you can provide your work, budget, portability needs and connected displays. Do not enter names, contact details, confidential company information or other personal information that is not needed for a recommendation.
The country you choose determines the catalog, currency and buying options. Apple Canada configuration prices are in CAD before sales tax. Switching countries does not convert your budget or transfer your answers to the other market.
Your consultation in this tab
The new consultation keeps your input, structured conditions, questions and results only in the current tab’s memory. It does not save progress in localStorage or sessionStorage. Refreshing the page or closing the tab starts a new consultation rather than restoring this one.
Progress saved in localStorage by the previous recommendation screen may remain in your browser. The new consultation does not read or automatically delete that data, and its “Start over” action does not clear that older storage. To remove it, clear PickMinded’s site data in your browser settings.
AI consultation
When AI is enabled, your original input, context retained in the current consultation and structured conditions may be sent to OpenRouter and its connected model provider, together with server-selected candidates and evidence. AI can interpret needs and propose follow-up questions, comparisons and provisional judgments. The server checks supplied configurations, prices and known mandatory constraints. Requests include a setting asking the provider not to store the response.
Service measurements
Optional analytics run only when you grant permission under the current notice and collection is enabled by the operator. Declining analytics does not disable the advisor, though standard usage limits still apply, and activity from before your consent is never sent retroactively. When active, we observe the currently visible page and current entry details, preserving your first observed entry across internal guide navigation, while an absent referrer is not treated as proof of direct traffic. We record approved public page paths, known source, search engine, and referring domain categories, approved campaign labels, country, language, currency, guide views, clicked guide links, first deliberate consultation submission and accepted start events, visible results, Apple configuration purchase-link clicks, and existing allowlisted response-time, error, and model-usage diagnostics; specification or source links are excluded, and clicks reflect purchase intent rather than actual purchases.
Data is forwarded only to configured logs or PostHog, where page fields may use canonical public PickMinded addresses built from approved routes. We strictly exclude original browser URLs with query strings or hashes, raw referrer URLs, arbitrary query or UTM parameters, search terms, unregistered external hostnames, unrecognized app names, consultation or model text and hashes, email and account details, and real IP addresses. Random analytics identifiers and separate analytics session IDs are used solely for page, source, and consultation-conversion measurement and are kept separate from the IDs that operate your consultation. We do not create user profiles, record screens, or use device fingerprinting; measurements reflect observed consented activity rather than complete visitor counts or identified individuals, and an unmarked visit is not proof of a human.
File-based records are retained for at most 30 days. If Vercel runtime logs are used, the hosting platform controls retention, which varies by plan from one hour to a maximum of 30 days. Exported records are used for quality review and deleted within 30 days.
When PostHog is enabled by the operator in the US region, allowlisted analytics events are sent to that PostHog environment. Retention there follows the configured PostHog project policy rather than the application's 30-day local-file setting. Read PostHog’s retention policy.
Optional usage and quality analytics
The first-party pickminded_analytics cookie stores the notice version, your choice (including refusal), and the timestamp for up to 180 days, with no visitor ID. Your preference persists across site-language switches and stays separate from the current consultation kept in browser tab memory.
Optional browser-tab storage maintains your measurement session and initial observed entry during same-tab navigation and reloads. This session expires after 30 minutes without measured activity or 24 hours at most, and while separate tabs start independently, a duplicated tab may inherit an active observation session. Blocking this storage may split observations across actions, but your consultation will continue to function normally. The 30-minute guide-to-consultation handoff is consumed once an accepted consultation starts, never stores user text or advice, and cannot restore a consultation after a refresh. If consent is withdrawn, expires, or the notice changes, previous measurement states are not reused, though expired data may remain in temporary storage until your next action or until the tab closes. An explicit operator or test label can remain within the tab during a valid grant, but it never substitutes for consent. No persistent analytics visitor IDs are placed in cookies or local storage; our 180-day preference cookie stores only the notice version, your choice, and the timestamp.
You can reopen 'Cookie settings' in the footer at any time to reject optional analytics and withdraw previous permission for future requests. A request already in progress when you withdraw may still finish, and withdrawing does not automatically delete data already sent. To request deletion of previously recorded data, please contact us using the privacy contact details on this page.
Rejecting analytics does not disable the AI consultation you request (which still sends your input to the configured AI provider) or service operation tasks like rate limiting, abuse prevention, and minimal security and error handling.
Abuse prevention
To limit excessive production AI requests, we store hashed session identifiers and IP addresses, request counts and expiry information in Upstash Redis. Session records last up to 24 hours, IP records up to ten minutes and the global request counter up to one hour. We do not send messages or raw AI responses to this store. This processing also applies when quality measurement is disabled.
External links
Configuration links open Apple’s official store for the selected country. Apple’s privacy policy applies after you leave PickMinded. PickMinded currently receives no affiliate commission from these links.
Contact
Contact us at contact@pickminded.com.