Privacy policy
There is no account to create. This site runs one analytics tool and shows ads served by Google, both of which set cookies, and both are switched off entirely on the page where you would type your taxpayer identification number.
No account, one analytics tool, Google ads
- Account required
- None. There is nothing to sign up for
- Personal data collected
- None, other than an email you choose to send us
- Analytics
- Microsoft Clarity, on every page except the worksheet
- Advertising
- Google AdSense, on every page except the worksheet
- Cookies
- Two set by Clarity, plus advertising cookies set by Google and its partners
- Data sold by us
- None. We hold no visitor data to sell
- Worksheet data
- Never transmitted. It stays in your browser
The W-9 worksheet
The W-9 preparation worksheet runs as a small script inside your browser. There is no form submission, no network request carrying your entries, no cookie, and no local storage. Your name, address and taxpayer identification number exist only in the page in front of you, and they disappear when you close or reload the tab. Nobody here can retrieve them afterward, because there was never anywhere for them to be retrieved from.
The printout is the weak point. It masks your TIN by default for that reason, and a shared or public computer is the wrong place to prepare one.
What we do collect
| Category | Position |
|---|---|
| Cookies | Two set by Microsoft Clarity: _clck, which lasts a year and ties your visits together, and _clsk, which lasts a day and groups one session. Google and other ad vendors set their own advertising cookies, described below |
| Analytics | Microsoft Clarity, which records page views, clicks, scrolling and mouse movement so we can see which explanations people abandon. It masks text and form entries by default, and it does not run at all on the worksheet. Clarity itself builds no advertising profile |
| Advertising | Google AdSense shows ads on this site. Google and third-party vendors use cookies to serve ads based on your earlier visits to this and other websites. Google’s advertising cookies let it and its partners serve those ads. See how Google uses information from sites that use its services |
| Server logs | Our hosting provider may keep standard technical logs, such as IP address, user agent, requested URL and timestamp, for security and operational purposes. We do not use them to build profiles |
| Email you send us | Retained only as long as needed to answer you, then deleted. Never added to a marketing list |
| Forms | There are no data-collection forms on this site. The worksheet is not a form submission |
| Third-party embeds | Clarity from clarity.ms; Google AdSense, which loads ads and ad frames from Google domains such as googlesyndication.com and doubleclick.net along with images from advertisers; and Cloudflare’s own cookieless page-view beacon, which the host inserts and which sees nothing Cloudflare does not already see as the network carrying this page to you. No fonts, videos or social widgets load from anywhere else |
Clarity is a session recorder, and the worksheet is the one page where you type a taxpayer identification number and watch it render into a preview. Clarity masks form entries by default, but the preview is ordinary page text, and default behavior is not a sound basis on which to risk recording somebody’s Social Security number. So the script is left out of that page entirely. We do not rely on a setting telling it to ignore the page. The Google ad script is left out of it too, because any script on a page can read what that page shows.
Everywhere else it loads only once the page has finished rendering, which keeps it out of the way of the reading you came to do.
Never send us your tax information
We have no use for your Social Security number, your EIN, or a copy of your completed form, and holding any of them would be a liability for both of us. Describe the situation in words and redact anything identifying. How to handle your TIN safely
Your choices
- Analytics: a browser that blocks third-party scripts, or an extension that blocks
clarity.ms, stops it dead and costs you nothing on this site. Clearing cookies for this domain removes the two it sets. There is no account to delete and no preferences to manage. - Personalized ads: you can turn off ads based on your interests in Google’s My Ad Center, and opt out of other vendors’ interest-based ads at aboutads.info. Blocking
googlesyndication.comstops the ads loading at all. - Use the worksheet offline if you prefer. Load the page, disconnect, and it still works, because the script is already sitting in the page you have.
- Email deletion: ask us at editor@w9form.org and we will delete any correspondence we hold from you.
- If you do not want a digital copy of the worksheet on a machine, print it and skip saving.
Children
This site is a reference for a business tax form and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes we will update it and change the date shown at the top of this page. If we add a new tool that collects data, this page will name it before it goes live.