Privacy

This is a personal blog. It is not a business, it sells nothing, and it has no interest in building a profile of you. The privacy posture follows from that: collect the little that helps me understand whether the writing is read, and nothing else.

What I collect

Aggregate, anonymous analytics, gathered without cookies. When you read a page I record the page visited, where the visit came from (the referring site or search engine), an approximate country, and the broad device and browser type. On articles I also measure how far down the page a reader scrolls and roughly how long the page stays open and in focus, so I can tell which essays hold attention.

None of this identifies you. There is no cookie, no persistent identifier, and no login. Visitors are counted with a hash that rotates daily and cannot be traced back to you from one day to the next. The approximate country is derived from your IP address; the address itself is not stored.

What I don't do

No tracking cookies, no cross-site tracking, no advertising networks, no behavioural profiling, no fingerprinting for ads. I don't sell, rent, or share your data, and there is no third party building an ad profile off the back of your visit. Nothing is stored on your device, and reading here identifies you in no way, which is why there is no consent banner to click through. The one piece of personal data I hold is an email address, and only if you hand it to me yourself by joining the list.

Who processes the data

The site runs on a server I rent from Hetzner (Germany), which keeps short-lived technical logs for security and operation. Cloudflare sits in front as a CDN and security proxy, so it processes each request, including your IP address, to deliver pages and block abuse. The analytics are handled by Umami Cloud, a privacy-focused, cookieless analytics service. The mailing list, if you join it, is held by EmailOctopus in the United Kingdom (see below). These providers process data only to keep the site running, measured, and able to send what you asked for, never for their own marketing.

The mailing list

If you subscribe, I store your email address and nothing else. No name, no company, no inferred interests. The legal basis is your consent, given by submitting the form and then confirming it: your address stays in an unconfirmed state until you click the link in the confirmation email, and an address that is never confirmed can never be written to.

The list is used for one thing: telling you that a new essay exists. There is no sequence, no drip campaign, and no promotional mail. Every message carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, and unsubscribing removes you from the list rather than moving you to a quieter one. You can also write to me and I'll delete the address by hand.

The list is held by EmailOctopus (Three Hearts Digital Ltd, London), which acts as processor on my instructions and records the date of your consent, as the GDPR requires me to be able to prove it. Their platform can measure whether a message was delivered, opened, or clicked; I don't use those signals to build a profile of you, and you can ask me what is held against your address at any time.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask to access, correct, or delete personal data, object to its processing, and withdraw a consent you have given. The honest caveat: the analytics here are aggregate and anonymous, so unless you are on the mailing list I hold nothing that can be linked back to you individually. If you are on it, those rights apply in full to your address, and withdrawing consent is exactly what the unsubscribe link does. For anything you want to raise, write to [email protected] and I'll answer.

Changes

If this policy changes in any way that matters, the date above moves and the change is reflected here. There is no version buried in a contract somewhere; this page is the whole of it.