Privacy

This site uses privacy-first analytics. By default, every visit is measured the same anonymous way: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no advertising, and nothing ever sold or shared. If you accept the consent banner, one extra thing is stored in your browser so that return visits can be counted. Both lanes are listed in full below, and neither is needed to read anything here.

Who is responsible

The analytics on this site are run by the site's owner, who is the data controller and is accountable for this data. For any question or request, send an email.

What is collected

Everything collected is listed here. Both lanes gather the same coarse, non-identifying fields. The only difference is the final row.

• A one-day visitor hash, rotated every 24 hours, so it cannot be linked across days or matched to a person.
• Coarse location: country, region, and city.
• Browser, operating system, and device type.
• The page viewed, the referring page, and your browser's language.
• On-page engagement: scroll depth, time engaged, what you click (recorded as the kind of element and the words printed on it, for example a link reading "Read the essay"), and, for a click that leads off this site, the destination site only, never the full address. The contents of any field you type into are never recorded.

Those fields are collected on every visit, the same anonymous way, whether or not you accept the banner (the default, baseline lane). What accepting adds is not more kinds of data: it is a random return-visit token, stored in your browser, that ties your visits together over time so repeat visits can be counted. Without it, every visit is a stranger. Decline the banner, or send a Global Privacy Control signal, and no token is set and nothing is collected at all.

What is stored on your device

By default, nothing. The baseline count needs no cookie and no local storage of any kind.

Two things can be stored, and only in response to the consent banner:

• If you accept, one random token is saved in your browser's local storage. It is a small entry your browser keeps, meaningless outside this site, that lets return visits be counted and is never sent to a third party.
• If you decline, a small flag is saved instead. It records only that you were asked and said no, so that you are not asked again for at least six months. It holds nothing else.

Declining does not stop the anonymous baseline count, which runs for every visit either way.

What is not collected

• No name, email, or account. This site does not know who you are, in either lane, by design. (There is no login today. If one is ever added, it will be described here first.)
• No raw IP address is kept. It is used momentarily to derive coarse location, then discarded.
• No cross-site or third-party tracking. The consent token works only on this site and is never shared. It is random and anonymous: it separates "this browser, seen before" from "new," and nothing more.

Why it is collected

To understand which writing is read, and how. Nothing more.

Legal basis

The baseline analytics run on legitimate interest rather than consent. Your IP address is processed briefly, which is why a legal basis is owed at all, then discarded, and no name, account, raw IP address, or persistent identifier is retained. Because nothing identifying is kept and, by default, nothing is stored on your device, no consent banner is required for the baseline.

The banner exists for the second lane only. Counting repeat visits means storing something in your browser, and that needs your permission. That lane runs only if you accept. Its legal basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it, using the withdrawal link under Your choices below.

Who it is shared with

No one. This data is never sold or shared, and no third-party analytics vendor, Google or otherwise, ever sees it.

How long it is kept

Baseline analytics records are kept indefinitely. They hold nothing that identifies you: no name, no account, no raw IP address, no persistent unique identifier. The only baseline visitor identifier is a hash that works for a single calendar day, and the key that creates it is destroyed every 24 hours, so records cannot be tied to a person or linked to each other across days.

The consent token and anything tied to it are kept only while your consent stands. Withdraw it and the link is removed: Your choices below sets out exactly what is deleted and what stays behind as anonymous statistics.

Your choices and rights

You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data, or object to its collection, and you can complain to your local data-protection authority.

Withdrawing consent. If you accepted the banner, you can withdraw at any time using the withdrawal link on this page. Withdrawal does two things. In your browser, the token is deleted at once. On the server, your identifier and any account details are permanently deleted, and your past visit records are irreversibly stripped of any link to you, leaving only anonymous statistics that can never be traced back to you. This is not a blanket erasure of the analytics: the anonymous counts remain, because by then they point to no one. The server side completes promptly, and short-lived server backups expire automatically, with the same deletions re-applied if a backup is ever restored.

One honest limitation: in the baseline, because nothing identifying is kept, a specific person's data usually cannot be singled out on request. Providing the rough date and page visited helps locate and delete it.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, this site respects it automatically: it collects nothing at all, and shows you no banner. This site does not act on the older Do Not Track header, which was never finished as a standard and is being removed from browsers. If you want to opt out, use Global Privacy Control, or decline the banner.

Last updated: 2026-07-22