Privacy

This site counts a few things about what gets read. This page says exactly what, because a specific answer is worth more than a vague reassurance.

What is counted

• Page views, by URL. Which posts were opened, and how many times.
• Whether an article was read past halfway. A small script on post pages records one event when you have scrolled past the middle of the article and stayed for at least thirty seconds. It sends the page’s address and nothing else.
• Which link in an email was clicked. Links in the newsletter pass through this site before landing on the post, so the post can be counted.
• Which share a visit came from. When I post a link somewhere, the link carries a short tag — ?ref=li for LinkedIn, ?ref=hn for Hacker News. That tag is recorded and then removed from your address bar, so if you copy the URL and pass it on, you are sharing a clean link rather than my tag.

Everything above is counted in aggregate. The records are per post and per day. There is no column anywhere for who you are.

What is not counted

• No cookies. None, for any purpose.
• No localStorage, no fingerprinting, no advertising identifiers.
• No third-party analytics. Nothing here is Google Analytics, or any service like it. The counting is done by this site, for this site.
• No per-subscriber tracking. If you are on the mailing list, I cannot tell which posts you read. Not “I choose not to look” — the connection between a subscriber and a click is never recorded, so there is nothing to look at.
• No open tracking. Emails contain no tracking pixel. I do not know whether you opened one.
• No cross-site profile. Nothing here follows you anywhere else.

Global Privacy Control

If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal, the read-depth and referral counting does not run at all. No setting to find, no banner to dismiss.

The mailing list

If you subscribe, this site stores your email address and a random unsubscribe token, and nothing else. Subscribing is double-opt-in: you are not added until you click the link in a confirmation email. Every email carries one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing deletes the address rather than flagging it.

The list is not sold, shared, or handed to a newsletter platform. It lives on infrastructure I run, and mail is delivered through Resend.

Server logs

Requests to this site pass through Cloudflare, which keeps its own logs as any host does. That is ordinary infrastructure logging, not something built for measuring readers.

Why this page changed

Until August 2026 the subscribe box on this site said “no tracking.” Then I built a way to count which posts get read, which made that sentence untrue. Rather than leave it there, I removed it and wrote this instead. The promise that stayed is the one I can keep: no spam, a few emails a year, and one click to leave.

Questions: github.com/alexherrero.