Privacy

Last updated 11 September 2026.

This describes what the software actually does. Where a claim here is checkable, it is checkable — the site is a single application we run, and the behaviour below is in its code rather than in a vendor’s settings page.

What we do not collect

We do not run advertising. We do not sell or rent anything we hold. We do not build a profile of you, we do not buy data about you from anybody else, and we do not combine what happens here with anything from elsewhere.

Analytics, and the cookies it sets

We use Google Analytics to see which pieces get read. It sets first-party cookies on your device — _ga and one named for this property — and sends Google the page you are on, the page you came from, your approximate location, and your browser and device type. Google derives that location from your IP address; the address itself is not stored in our reporting.

We see totals. We cannot see who you are, and we do not try to.

If you would rather not be counted, any content blocker or tracking-protection setting stops it, and Google publishes a browser opt-out. We do not treat blocking it as a problem — the numbers are for deciding what to write next, not for following anybody around.

We set no other cookie for readers. A signed-in administrator gets a session cookie, and is excluded from analytics entirely.

What we collect, when you give it to us

The contact form. Your name, email address, optionally your company, and what you write. We use it to reply to you. It is stored in this site’s own database and is not sold, rented, or shared for marketing.

The newsletter. Your email address, and where on the site you subscribed from.

Subscribing is double opt-in: we send one email asking you to confirm, and nothing else until you do. If you never confirm, the address sits unconfirmed and is never mailed again. Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe, which works without a login, a survey, or a confirmation step.

Checking that a form was filled in by a person

Both of those forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which decides whether a submission came from a person or from a script. We added it because it was needed: of the first seven addresses to reach the newsletter, three were submitted by bots, and each one of those made this site send a confirmation email to somebody who never asked for it.

When a form is submitted, your browser loads a script from challenges.cloudflare.com and Cloudflare receives your IP address, your browser’s user-agent, and signals about how the page behaved in it. Cloudflare returns a token, and this site checks that token before accepting anything. It runs in invisible mode, so in almost every case there is nothing to see and nothing to click.

Cloudflare’s Turnstile Privacy Addendum governs what they do with that data. Turnstile runs only on the contact and newsletter forms; no other page asks Cloudflare anything about you.

What we record about the newsletter

We keep a record of every message we send you and what happened to it. For each one: when it was sent, whether it was delivered, whether it bounced or was reported as spam, and — for the newsletter only — whether it was opened and which links were clicked.

Opens are measured with a small invisible image. It reports that a mail client loaded an image, which is not the same as a person reading, and some clients load it automatically whether you looked or not. Links in the newsletter are rewritten so a click passes through our delivery provider before continuing to where it says it goes. The one-click unsubscribe link is never rewritten.

Only the newsletter carries these. A confirmation email carries no tracking image and no rewritten links.

We use this to see which pieces are worth writing more of. It is not shared, sold, or used to target advertising, and there is none here to target.

If you would rather not be counted, most mail clients can block remote images, which stops the open being recorded. Every issue’s unsubscribe link stops all of it.

What we record about robots

We keep a log of automated crawlers — which bot, which path, and the user-agent string it sent. This is how we know whether search engines and AI crawlers can read the site. It records no human visitor and contains no personal information.

What leaves this site

Analytics. Google, as described above.

Fonts. Pages load typefaces from Google Fonts, so your browser requests files from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, and Google receives your IP address as part of that request.

Bot protection. Cloudflare, on the two forms, as described above.

Email delivery. Messages are sent through Postmark, which processes the address and the message in order to deliver it, and reports back what happened to it. Their privacy terms apply to that processing.

Hosting. The site runs on Fly.io in the United States. Everything — the database, the uploaded files — is on one machine we control.

Nothing else. No advertising network, no tag manager, no social buttons that phone home. Videos are embedded so that nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.

What you can ask for

Use the contact form and we will tell you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. There is no verification hoop, because the amount of data involved is small enough to handle by hand.

To leave the newsletter, use the unsubscribe link in any issue — it is faster than asking us.

What we keep, and for how long

An enquiry is kept so we have the thread. A subscription is kept until you unsubscribe; the record that you unsubscribed is kept after that, because deleting it is how somebody gets re-subscribed by a later import. We can also remove an address from the list entirely, which is what happens to a signup we can tell was made by a bot.

The record of messages sent to you, and what happened to them, is kept while you are subscribed.

An address that hard-bounces or reports us as spam is suppressed and not mailed again.

Children

This site is not directed at anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes

If this changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the previous version stays in the site’s own history.

Who we are

Pure Inference Ventures, LLC — Atlanta, Georgia. Reach us through the contact form.