Privacy and data

A page about data on a site that gathers almost none is a short page, and short is the honest length for it. The magazine is a set of static pages: a page is the same for the first reader of the morning and the thousandth, nothing on it asks a visitor to sign in, to answer or to pay, and nothing on it reports back what a visitor did. What follows is the complete account, in three blocks, of what touches data here.

What the site stores

One thing, and one thing only: the mail a reader chooses to send. A message to the single address on the contact page arrives with the address it was sent from, the words written and whatever is attached. It is read in order to answer, and answering is the whole of what happens to it. Nothing from a message moves into a page, a list or a file that outlives the correspondence, and a reader who wants a message and its address removed says so in a reply, and that is where it ends.

What it does not store

There is no account to store anything into, and the pages carry no comment thread, no form and no payment button. Nothing on a page builds a profile of a visitor or measures one visitor against another. The summary is that the site has no memory of a visit: it can describe its pages, and it has nothing to describe its readers with, because it never collected anything about them.

Hosting and technical logs

The pages are served by a hosting platform, and a platform keeps the ordinary technical logs that any server keeps: which address was asked for, at what minute, from what kind of network. That record belongs to the infrastructure and is written for the infrastructure; the magazine adds nothing to it and reads nothing from it. Every font, every image and every script a page uses is loaded from this site itself, so a browser reading a page here talks to the hosting platform and to nothing else, and no advertising code and no analytics code rides along on a page. The whole picture, in one block:

Writing about your data

A question about any of this goes to the same address that corrections go to, and it gets an answer in words rather than in a policy document. The pages around this one describe the rest of the machinery: editorial standards for how content is sourced and corrected, sponsored content for what a payment is allowed to change here, and write to the editors for the address itself and what to put in a message so the reply is useful. The publishing facts of the site, the publisher of record and the terms on which the pages may be quoted, are stated beside this page in legal notice and terms.