How this site is paid for
The short version
Ghost Detector Lab is free, has no accounts and sells nothing directly. It is intended to be paid for by advertising, and by commission on links to equipment we recommend in the field notes.
Neither of those is permitted to change what the instruments report or what the guides recommend. That is not a promise of good intentions, it is a structural fact about how the site is built: no instrument on this site has a server, so there is nothing to weight, and no advertiser has ever seen a reading. The measurements are described in full on the methodology page and you are welcome to check them against your own room.
Advertising
This site currently carries no advertising at all. No advertising script is loaded, no ad network is contacted, and no space is reserved for one. When that changes, this page and the privacy notice will be updated before the first advert appears, and they will name the network.
Advertising will never be placed over an instrument, inside a camera view, or in the middle of an investigation. It goes in the written part of the page, below the equipment, in a labelled box, and nowhere else. This is a rule in the code rather than a preference, because a rule that lives in somebody’s memory is a rule until the first month revenue is down.
Equipment links
No link on this site is currently paid. Equipment is named in the field notes because it is what we would use, and there is no commission arrangement on any of it. If that changes, every paid link will be marked Paid link where it appears, and any article containing one will say so at the top before you have read a word of it.
What we will not do
We do not accept payment to review a product, to recommend one, or to change a verdict. No manufacturer has written or reviewed anything on this site, and no product placement has been sold in the case files or the field notes. If that ever changes, it will be stated on the piece concerned, in the same place and the same size as everything else.
The equipment guides are also, deliberately, not a shopping list. The first two items in what to buy first are a notebook and a carbon monoxide detector, and one of those is on that list because it has saved lives and not because anybody is paid for it.
Analytics
The site records anonymous page-view and performance figures so we know which pages are read and how fast they load. No cookie is set for it, no profile is built, and it never sees anything from a camera, a microphone or a motion sensor — see the privacy notice, which explains why that last one is a structural impossibility rather than a policy.