Privacy

Overview

Here's the upshot: this website does collect some minimal statistics, but nothing personally identifiable. I simply don't know who is looking at this site, or how often. I don't want to know.

If you sign up for the newsletter, I will have your email address. That's it. Email campains will include no link tracking, and no tracking pixels so I won't even know if you opened the email.

Your data is yours. I don't want it. I will never sell your data, and I don't even have anything useful to sell. I will never use the email addresses you provide during the newsletter signup for anything other than letting people know about my latest stories once a month. And I might not even send emails that often.

Note: Due to the YouTube and Twitch embeds, there is some third party tracking. More on that below.

Website statistics details

Website stat tracking is performed by Umami, a self-hosted (at least in my case) analytics platform. It can be easily configured to scrub anything personally identifiable from its reports, and, in its current configuration, it uses no cookies. All tracking is based on IP addresses, and I never see those.

What I do see is a general overview of how many people have visited my site in a day, and which pages they visited. Honestly, I mostly just want confirmation that people actually stop by to read my stories now and then.

I can see which countries my visitors are browsing from (discounting the use of VPNs), but there is no "this user came from this country" information stored by Umami. All I know is that someone from somewhere came to my site and, hopefully, enjoyed themselves.

Newsletter details

My newsletter service is provided by EmailOctopus. Their campaigns can be configured to omit all forms of invasive email tracking, such as the ones mentioned above, and that's exactly what I have done.

Should you sign up, the only information that I—or EmailOctopus for that matter—can see is that:

• at one point, you signed up for the newsletter via the form
• we have the email address you gave us
• and we've (presumably) sent you a few emails

Third party trackers and cookies

Sadly, I have yet to find a way to integrate my latest YouTube videos and my Twitch stream while blocking all trackers and cookies. Also, Google's ReCAPTCHA (included in the newsletter signup form on same pages) uses a cookie.

Hence the cookie banner... which requires a cookie of its own. Oh the irony.

If I find a way to fix all that, I will, and take the cookie banner down.