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Privacy policy

Photo of a woman putting her pointing finger in front of her mouth making a "shh" sound to keep quiet.
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

Hi,

I want you to know what data I'm collecting, and why, and how you can opt out of it, if you wish to do so.

Things I don’t do

I do not have any Facebook scripts on my site, anywhere. I don’t like Facebook, I don’t want to be tracked by it, and I don’t want you to be tracked by it either.

Nor do I have any Twitter (X) scripts included. The links are just <a> tags that lead to Twitter.

I do not care who you are exactly, no personally identifiable information is transmitted / stored.

Things I do

I do have Google Analytics on the page.

As of 24th April 2018, I no longer have Google Analytics on my blog anywhere. I looked at it maybe every 3 weeks or so anyways, the most I’ve learned from it is that people don’t visit on weekends (who would have thought?). Tim Nash also wrote a post on why he’d abandoned it which made me realise I don’t need it either.

Plus my pi-hole blocks traffic there anyways, so it’s hard to look at it.

That said I did install Seline as a privacy friendly tracking method on 4th September 2024. It does not store cookies, it does not track you cross device or cross browser. I do not get a lot of information besides what pages were visited how many times, from which country, what device, and if they stayed on the same browser, what their journey through the site was. My pi-hole is happy with it.

How to opt out

If you want to be super sure that there’s nothing tracking you here, do these. Also it’s generally a good idea to do these anyways.

Install an adblocker (you should install an adblocker anyways), and they usually block all tracking scripts from loading. I use uBlock Origin (Chrome webstore, Firefox add-on, Microsoft Edge app store).

You can also block the seline tracking script’s URL so it doesn’t load for you. The URL to block is https://cdn.seline.so/seline.js.

Other data

There is a subscription feature, a newsletter, and a tip jar. If you do decide to send your email address and other details my way, Ghost(pro) will store them on my behalf, and I will see it. It is only used to deliver you the occasional email when I have a new article coming out. If you also decide to send money my way, then Stripe will hold your card data for me. I will see your name, and address if you supplied that, but not your actual payment info.

Cookies

There are 2 families of cookies

_cfduid

I use CloudFlare to make sure my domain loads over https, and it also has some added benefit of caching files closer to you. They use a cookie named __cfduid, which they identify your device as a singular machine behind a shared IP address. You can read their technical reasoning here.

github cookies

On certain blog posts I embed code via GitHub Gists. GitHub then places a bunch of cookies on your machine for their own purposes, which is to figure out whether you’re logged in to GitHub or not, and other, basic details, according to their documentation on this.

In the future I’ll do my best to host code in such a way that I do not rely on GitHub, so I can get rid of the cookies as well.

If you have any questions about this, let me know over Twitter at @javorszky, or send me an email at gabor (at) javorszky (dot) co (dot) uk.