This site is read, not measured. Nothing here watches you, counts you, or reports back about you to anyone. That is not a policy I adopted to be agreeable; it is how the site is built, and this page says exactly what that means.
Nothing tracks you
There is no analytics software on this site. No Google, no Meta, no advertising, no pixels, no share buttons, no fonts or scripts borrowed from anyone else’s servers. When you read an essay here, your browser talks to this site and to nothing else.
The site sets no cookies for readers. There is nothing to consent to, which is why you have not been asked.
There are no comments
Comments are closed everywhere, and none are stored. If you want to tell me I am wrong, write to me instead. I read what arrives.
If you write to me
The contact form asks for a name, an email address and a message. When you send it, three things happen: the message is emailed to a mailbox I control, a copy is kept in this site’s own database, and the form records the time, the page you sent it from, and a scrambled version of your network address. The scrambling is one-way, so the address itself is not stored and cannot be worked back out. It exists only to slow down a machine sending the same form a thousand times.
I do not add you to a mailing list. There is no mailing list. I do not pass your message or your address to anyone, and I do not use it for anything except replying to you.
Nothing on this site is sent to another company. There is no spam service, no mailing platform, no form provider. The form checks itself for machines, here, and that is the end of it.
The unavoidable part
This site sits on a rented server, and that server keeps ordinary logs: which pages were requested, when, and from which network address. Every website on earth has these, mine included, and I would be lying if I said otherwise. I do not read them for pleasure and I do not build anything out of them.
The site also records failed sign-in attempts, so that somebody guessing passwords can be slowed down. Those records are scrambled the same one-way manner and are removed as they age.
Links to other places
Essays here link to sources elsewhere. Once you follow a link you are on someone else’s site, under their rules, and most of them are considerably more interested in you than I am.
Asking me to delete something
If you have written to me and would rather I did not keep it, ask, and I will delete the message and the record of it. You do not need a reason.
If this changes
If any of this stops being true, this page changes first. I would rather lose the feature than write a page that quietly stops matching the site.