Privacy

Page views

Every successful HTML page view writes one row to Cloudflare Analytics Engine. The row holds four things: the path you visited, the hostname of the site that linked you here if there was one, the country Cloudflare associates with the request, and whether the browser said it was mobile, desktop, or did not say.

It does not hold an IP address, a user agent, a cookie, an identifier of any kind, or anything that would let two visits be recognized as the same person.

Two paths carry an identifier in the URL rather than in a parameter: a draft preview link and a media key. Those are redacted to a fixed placeholder before the row is written, so the token itself is never stored. Admin pages are skipped entirely, and so is everything that is not an HTML page: images, feeds, the markdown copies of posts, and the API.

How long Cloudflare keeps those rows is Cloudflare’s retention policy, not a setting in this repository. This page does not quote a number it does not control.

Asking a question

The search page has an optional Ask feature. Using it sends your question to a language model running on Cloudflare’s network, together with passages from this site that matched it. The answer is generated from those passages.

Answers are cached for seven days, keyed by a hash of the question, so that the same question asked twice does not bill a second generation. The cache holds the question’s hash, the answer, and which passages it drew on. It does not hold who asked.

The feature is opt-in per question: classic search never reaches it, and a page that is not searched never sends anything anywhere.

Security reports

This site sends a Content Security Policy, and browsers report violations of it to an endpoint here. Those reports are written to the Worker’s log stream verbatim. A report is generated by your browser and describes the page and the resource that was blocked; it is a debugging signal about the site, not about you.

Mentions from other sites

Another site can tell this one that it has linked to a post here. When that happens, this site fetches the page that was named and stores four things: the address of that page, which post it linked to, an author name read from the page if it publishes one, and a short excerpt of the text around the link. It does not store the IP address of whoever sent it. Nothing appears anywhere on the site until it has been approved by hand, and until then it is visible only to the administrator.

Cookies

There is one cookie for ordinary readers. It is called theme, it holds either light or dark, and it lasts a year. You only have it if you have used the theme button; until then the site simply follows your device and stores nothing. It exists so the site renders in the colors you chose on the first byte rather than flickering into them. Nothing else is stored on your device.

There is a second cookie, a sign-in session, and it exists only for the one administrator of this site. If you have not signed in, you do not have it.

Who else is involved

Cloudflare runs everything: the Worker that serves these pages, the database, the file storage, the analytics, and the model that answers Ask questions. No page on this site loads anything from another company’s server on its own, which is why there are no third-party scripts to disclose.

The Germomics podcast host is reached only if you play the episode on the home page: playing it loads the audio from the podcast’s host, by way of OP3, the download counter the show uses.

Google is the sign-in provider for the administrator account. It is reached only from the sign-in page, and only by the one person who can use it.

Checking any of this

The repository is the authority for every claim above, and the colophon describes how the site is built. If this page and the code ever disagree, the code is right and this page is a bug.

Questions about privacy

Email privacy@dustinedwards.info about anything on this page, or to ask what the site holds that concerns you.