The newsletter and the free PDFs
If you subscribe to the Vibe Writing letter or request one of the free PDFs, we collect your email address, the date you subscribed, the page you subscribed from, and which download you requested. The email with your download links is sent through Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES). After it is sent, your address and those details are stored with our newsletter provider, SendPulse, which sends the newsletter. We use this information to deliver the PDFs and the newsletter, to keep the list segmented by what people asked for, and to send occasional labeled notes about Orwellix, the writing workspace that publishes this site. We do not sell or rent the list. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list. To have your address deleted entirely, email us at the address below. The form includes a hidden field that automated submissions tend to fill in. Entries that fill it are discarded.
What this site remembers in your browser
Three small values may be stored in your browser's local storage: whether you chose the light or dark theme, whether you dismissed the Orwellix notice at the top of the page (it stays dismissed for two weeks), and whether you have subscribed, so download pages can tell you to use the same address. None of these is sent to us, and clearing your browser data removes them. The only cookies on this site are the Google Analytics cookies described below.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages, prompts, and downloads are useful. It records pages viewed, approximate location, device and browser type, how you arrived, and a few actions on the page: copying a prompt, requesting a PDF, clicking a link to another site, and searching this site. Google provides this to us as aggregate reports. Advertising features, ad personalization, and data sharing for ads are turned off. Visitors in the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland are measured without analytics cookies, using Google's consent mode. Elsewhere Google Analytics sets first-party cookies (named _ga) to recognize returning visits. Google processes this data under its own privacy policy. You can block it with a content blocker or Google's opt-out browser add-on, and the site works the same either way.
Hosting and infrastructure
The hosting and security infrastructure that delivers this site processes standard request data, such as IP addresses, requested URLs, timestamps, and browser user-agent strings, to serve pages, prevent abuse, and keep aggregate logs. The newsletter form endpoint applies a rate limit by IP address, held briefly in memory and not written to a database. Social preview images are generated by this site's own server. No third-party image service is involved. Fonts are self-hosted.
Search engines
We verify the domain with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap. Those services report aggregate search impressions and clicks to us, but they do not give us information about individual visitors.
Outbound links
Links to Orwellix carry campaign parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content) so Orwellix can see that a visit came from this site and from which placement. That information is processed under Orwellix's own privacy policy once you arrive there. Other outbound links, such as sources cited in lessons, go to third-party sites with their own policies.
What we do not do
No advertising or retargeting pixels, no session recording, no fingerprinting, no selling or sharing of data for advertising, no comment system, no user accounts, and no contact form. Contact is by email. If any of this changes, this page will be updated before the change goes live.
Children
This site is for a general adult audience and does not knowingly collect information from children.
Questions and requests
Write to [email protected] to ask what we hold about your address, to have it deleted, or with any other privacy question. The newsletter page describes what subscribers receive.