Privacy
What this site knows about you, which is very little.
Last updated 12 October 2026. This is a personal site. It has no accounts and no shop. It has two forms, a newsletter signup and a contact form, and this page says what each one keeps.
01 / The short version
I wanted to know whether anyone reads the writing. That is the whole reason this site measures anything. It counts pages, notes roughly which country a reader is in, and records a few events such as how far down a page someone got. Nothing here asks for your name and nothing collected is sold to anyone.
Google Analytics 4 does the counting. Microsoft Clarity shows me how a page was used: where readers scrolled, clicked and gave up. Cloudflare hosts the site and delivers it to your browser. If you subscribe or use the contact form, your address is stored in a database on Neon and the emails are sent through Resend. If you write to me, that email is handled the way personal email is handled: I read it and I reply.
Every reader sees a cookie bar with Accept and Decline. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, nothing is measured with cookies until you press Accept. Elsewhere analytics is on from the first page, and Decline turns it off and removes its cookies. Saying no costs you nothing. The site works exactly the same either way.
02 / What is collected
Six things, all of them about pages rather than people.
Pages and visits
Which pages were opened, when, and in what order within a single visit.
Approximate location
Country, and usually city, worked out from your IP address by Google. The IP address itself is not shown to me.
Device and browser
Screen size, browser and operating system, which is how I find out that a layout is failing someone.
Where you arrived from
The referring site or search engine, when your browser sends one.
A few reading events
Custom events for scroll depth, share button clicks, clicks on links leading off the site, and time spent on a page.
How a page was used
Microsoft Clarity records mouse movement, clicks, taps and scrolling on a page, and can replay a visit so I can see where a layout fails. Anything typed into a form is masked before it leaves your browser. The recording includes the address of each page. Clarity is not started on the search page.
03 / What is not collected
No account, no payment, no advertising profile.
There is no account, so there is no profile and no password. Nothing is sold on this site, so no payment details are ever taken. There are no advertising tags, no remarketing, no advertising cookies and no audience shared with an ad network. Reader data is not sold, rented or traded. The only list is the newsletter, and you are on it only if you asked to be and confirmed by email.
Two small forms
The newsletter form keeps your email address, its status and the dates you joined or left. The contact form keeps your name, email, organisation if given, and your message. Nothing else is asked for.
Site search
Questions typed into the site search, and the notes opened from them, are kept for 45 days with no cookie and no IP address, so the search can learn which notes answer which questions. Nothing is sent if your browser asks not to be tracked.
No fingerprinting
No attempt is made to identify a device or a person across sites, and no third party is invited in to try. Each page reports how fast it loaded, with only its address, phone or computer, and the Cloudflare location that served it: no cookie, IP address or other identifier, and nothing if your browser asks not to be tracked.
No sensitive data
Nothing here asks for health information, identity documents or anything else you would not put on a postcard.
Questions you ask the notes
When you press Ask, in the search box, on the search page or on a note, the question goes to this site's own server, where Cloudflare Workers AI, on the same network that hosts the site, turns it into numbers so passages close in meaning can be found. The question is then kept, cut to 200 characters and with anything that looks like an email address or a phone number removed, together with the notes it was shown. No IP address, cookie or other identifier is kept with it, so it cannot be traced back to you, and it is used only to make the answers better. Cloudflare keeps these records for three months. If your browser asks not to be tracked, the question is answered but not kept.
04 / Cookies and opting out
Small files, easy to refuse.
Google Analytics sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_ followed by a short code, so that one visit can be told apart from the next. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland they are set only after you press Accept. Everywhere else they are set from your first page unless you press Decline. They hold a random identifier and nothing else, and last up to two years. No advertising cookies are set on this site, and advertising consent is never asked for because there are no ads.
Microsoft Clarity sets two cookies of its own, _clck and _clsk, under the same rule: only after Accept in those regions, and elsewhere unless you press Decline. They hold a random identifier for the browser and for the visit, and last up to one year and one day. Where Clarity is not allowed it is not loaded at all.
When analytics cookies are not allowed, because you are in one of those regions and have not accepted, or because you pressed Decline, none is written. Google then receives only a cookieless signal that a page was opened, with no identifier stored on your device.
One cookie of my own, rp_consent, remembers your answer for twelve months so the question is not asked on every page. It holds the word granted or denied and nothing else. Change your mind any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page; declining removes the analytics cookies. You can also block cookies for this domain in your browser or use a content blocker. None of this changes what you can read.
05 / Hosting, email and retention
Who handles what, and for how long.
Cloudflare
The site is hosted and delivered by Cloudflare, acting as a processor on my behalf. To serve a page and to keep the site standing it handles your IP address and standard request logs, and uses them for security, abuse prevention and delivery. That is what putting anything on the web requires, not a decision made to learn more about you.
The address info@rolstonpaul.com is a Cloudflare Email Routing address that forwards to a personal mailbox I read myself. Whatever you send arrives with it: your address, your name if you sign the message, and the thread as it continues. I use it to reply to you and for nothing else.
Newsletter and contact form
Addresses and messages from the two forms are stored in a Neon database, and the confirmation and reply emails go out through Resend. Both act as processors on my behalf. An unconfirmed newsletter address is never written to except for the one confirmation email.
How long things are kept
Analytics reporting ages out on the retention setting configured in Google Analytics. Microsoft keeps Clarity recordings for 30 days, and a small sample for up to 13 months. Request and security logs follow whatever schedule Cloudflare applies, which I do not control. A newsletter address stays until you leave or ask me to delete it. Email and contact messages I keep while the correspondence is still useful, and I delete them on request.
06 / Your rights
One email does all of it.
Wherever you are reading from, you can ask me to:
- 01Give you a copy of what I hold about you.
- 02Delete it.
- 03Stop processing it.
Write to info@rolstonpaul.com and say which one you want. I answer within a few days, in plain language, and I will not ask you to fill in anything. For analytics the honest answer is that there is no name attached to hand back, and the fastest way to remove yourself is to block the cookie. For email I can find your thread and delete it, which is a real thing I can actually do.
If this page changes, the date at the top of it changes with it. Nothing is quietly added.