Privacy

This page describes the two places data about you exists in connection with this site: the request log the host keeps in order to serve a page at all, and whatever you type into the contact form.

How a page reaches you

The site is a set of static files served through a hosting and CDN provider (Cloudflare). To deliver a page, that provider processes the ordinary information every web request carries: your IP address, the time, the path you asked for, the HTTP status returned, your user-agent string, and the referring page if your browser sent one. It is processed on my behalf for two purposes:

• counting how many times pages were requested, in aggregate, so I know which pieces are read;
• blocking abuse — floods, scrapers hammering the origin, and the automated nonsense any domain with a twenty-year history attracts.

The lawful basis, for readers in jurisdictions that ask for one, is legitimate interest in operating and defending a website. The provider retains that log for a limited period under its own policy, and the copy I can see is the aggregate count.

Cloudflare publishes its own privacy documentation at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy. Reading it is worthwhile: what a CDN sees is the honest limit of any privacy statement made by a site behind one, including this one.

What the pages themselves are

A page here is HTML and one stylesheet, served from this domain. Type the address into your browser's network panel and the request list is the page, its stylesheet, its images and its favicon — that is the whole inventory, and checking it takes about ten seconds.

The contact form

The contact form posts to this domain. What it stores is:

Your message, and the subject line

Kept so it can be read and answered.

Your name and email address, if you fill them in

Both fields are optional. The address is used to reply to the message you sent, and the name is used to credit you on Corrections if your message changes a page.

The IP address and browser string the submission arrived with

Kept to block abuse of the form.

How long: a message is held for as long as the correspondence is useful. For a correction that can mean indefinitely, because the record of why a page changed is part of the record of the page. Abuse-blocking data is held only as long as the block is needed.

Credit on Corrections follows what you ask for in the message — your name, a handle, or nothing.

Links off this site

Articles link to primary sources: project documentation, release notes, repositories, mirrors, the Internet Archive. Those are other people's sites with other people's privacy practices, and this policy stops at the click. An outbound link goes straight to the address shown in it.

Your rights

You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, through the contact form. In practice the answer is usually "one message and nothing else", and deleting it takes about a minute. Requests are answered within 30 days.

Children

This site is written for an adult technical readership and is not directed at children. The contact form is the only route by which anyone can submit information to it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it, and the change is listed on Corrections like any other material change to the site.