Our privacy policy.
Overview
I go to great lengths to protect my own privacy. I use:
- an independent search engine,
- an independent, Swiss-based email service,
- a network-level DNS filter,
- a local ad blocker, and
- the most privacy-preserving VPN on the planet.
I pay money for all of these services (yes, I pay for my search engine, try it out).
I tell you this so that you believe me when I say I care about your privacy as much as you do. These aren’t just words to placate you. I mean it.
The simplest way for me to care about your privacy is to collect as little of your personal data as possible. Here’s how.
Purchases
If you make a purchase, Shopify requires your email, name, street address, and credit card details. They need these to validate your card and prevent fraud.
I can see your email address, name, and street address. I’ll never use them without your permission (e.g. I don’t sign you up to my mailing list unless you check a box).
(Perhaps making mine the only online store in the world where that button actually does something. 😡)
I can only see the last 4 digits of your card number.
This site
As of the time of writing, I can see the values that you store in your user settings. (e.g. the name of your Obsidian vault, if you specify one).
They’re in a dashboard at Clerk, the authentication service I use. I’d have to hunt around to find them. I won’t. Unless you ask for support that requires I do so.
I’d really like to encrypt these settings one day. But doing so isn’t trivial. Given the nature of the data, it’s not high on my list.
Analytics
People conflate ‘analytics’ with ‘trackers’, which is a shame. But the industry dug that hole for themselves, so here we are.
‘Analytics’ tells me, at a very high level, how many people visit this site, and which pages they view. This helps me spot broad patterns.
I use the open source GoatCounter for this. It doesn’t track you in any way. It isn’t recording that you visited this or that page. It just records that somebody did.
Many ad blockers will block these requests out of the box. If you’d like to do it explicitly, block jdcmal.goatcounter.com.
By the way, this has been possible since the first web server. Every server can show a log of the requests it’s served, and that’s essentially all that this is.
Cookies
Clerk, my authentication service, uses cookies to track your user session (i.e. if you’re logged in or not).
Contact me
If you have any concerns at all.
I’ve been on the internet since 1994. I remember when it wasn’t full of sleaze and junk. I’m doing my best to be a good citizen.