← back to the website · what is written down, and how to stop it
Privacy, plainly
Everything below is generated from the settings the site actually runs on rather than typed out by hand, so it cannot quietly stop being true. The switch at the bottom works whether or not you have an account, because visitors without accounts are recorded too, and an opt-out you have to sign in to reach is not really an opt-out.
what this website writes down
the site keeps a note of how it is used, so that the people who make it can tell what is working, what is slow and what is broken. it is not sold, it is not shared, and it is not joined to anything else.
nobody reads it one visitor at a time. it is added up into daily numbers, and the numbers are what anybody looks at.
what it keeps
- which pages were opened, and in what order within one visit
- when a visit started, how long it lasted, and how many pages it touched
- whether you arrived from a link, a search, a social app, or straight from your own bookmark, and the name of the campaign if the link carried one
- whether the screen is a phone, a tablet or a desktop, the size of the window rounded to the nearest few pixels, your language, your hour of the clock away from the middle of the world, and whether you asked for less movement
- buttons and links pressed, forms sent, and how far down a page was read
- errors the page ran into, and how quickly pages drew and answered
what it refuses to keep
- your name, your address, and the account you signed in with. a visit says whether somebody was signed in and never who
- your ip address. it is never read, never stored, and never hashed, because a hashed address is still an address to anybody with a list to try
- what your browser calls itself. the window size answers the only question this site has about a device, and answers it better
- the whole address you came from. only the site it was on is kept, never the page, the search you typed, or anything after the question mark
- anything precise enough to pick you out of a crowd. sizes are rounded, languages are cut to two letters, and clocks are cut to whole hours
- anything at all about what you do on any other website
how long it is kept
- the individual notes are thrown away after 30 days
- a visit is thrown away after 45 days
- the daily sums, which hold no note of any one person, are kept for 400 days and then thrown away too
- a visitor is forgotten entirely after 400 days away
you can ask it to stop
turn this off and this browser stops sending anything, right away and for as long as the setting stays. nothing else on the site changes.
Separately from any of this, the site sets two cookies and neither is for counting: one remembers that you are logged in, and one lets the corkboard tell which notes are yours. Your name is kept by this browser and never leaves it.
If you have an account, this same switch is on your settings page, next to everything else you can change about yourself.
OUTSIDE THE BOT · we keep an email address and a password and that is genuinely all we want