Privacy

Analytics

I use Google Analytics 4 to see which articles people read and roughly where they arrive from. It runs only on heyvenkat.com — the tag checks the hostname before it loads anything, so development machines and test runs report nothing.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies in your browser and Google processes that data on its own terms. I see aggregate reports: page views, referrers, countries, broad device categories. I do not have, and could not assemble, a view of an individual reader.

If you would rather not be counted, any content blocker or tracking protection will stop the tag loading, and nothing on this site breaks when it does.

Article view counts

Each article carries a counter of its own, separate from Analytics. When a page has been visible for five seconds it sends the article slug — nothing else — and a single number for that article increases by one.

It stores one key in your browser session so a refresh is not counted twice. That key is cleared when you close the tab. No identifier of any kind is stored alongside the count, so the number cannot be taken apart into people.

The contact form

If you write to me, I store what you typed: your name, your email address, the subject you picked and your message. I also store a one-way hash of your IP address and your browser user-agent string, both of which exist to stop the form being used to send bulk mail. The address itself is never written down in a readable form.

Messages are deleted automatically 180 days after they arrive. That is long enough for a conversation to pause and resume, and short enough that I am not sitting on an archive of other people’s correspondence.

I do not add anyone to a mailing list. There is no mailing list.

What this site does not do

There is no advertising, no third-party tracker beyond the Analytics tag described above, and no cross-site profiling. Images and video are served from my own domain rather than hotlinked, so no third party learns what you are reading here. Fonts are compiled into the site at build time, so your browser makes no request to a font host.

I do not sell, rent or share anything collected here. There is nobody to share it with.

Asking me to remove something

Write to me and say so. If you have used the contact form and want the message deleted before its 180 days are up, tell me which address you used and I will delete it. For anything held by Google Analytics, Google’s own controls are the authoritative route, since that data sits with them rather than with me.