What this site knows about you

The site itself sets no cookies. The only cookies that can appear are Google’s two, and only after you have said yes. Decline, or simply never answer, and there are none at all.

Until 3 August 2026 this page said there was no analytics of any kind, and that was true. I have since added Google Analytics, because running a site with no idea whether anyone reads it turned out to be a harder position to hold than I expected. Saying so plainly seems better than quietly editing the old sentence out.

No cookies are set until you accept. Google’s script does load on every page, and before you answer it sends one request telling Google a page was viewed, with no identifier attached and nothing stored on your device. That is Google’s Consent Mode, and it is how the count of visits stays roughly honest without tracking the people who would rather not be tracked.

For a few hours on 3 August 2026 this was stricter still: the script was not fetched at all until you accepted. That was changed the same day because it left me unable to see anything about readers who never answered, which is most people. I would rather write that down than have the page quietly describe a stricter site than the one you are on.

If you accept, it sets _ga and _ga_G-9GR1DR3RYC, both lasting two years, and Google processes them under their own policy. It tells me which pages are read and roughly where readers came from. Advertising, remarketing and personalisation signals are refused explicitly in the configuration, whatever you choose.

You can change your mind at any time from the storage page. Turning it off deletes those cookies immediately rather than waiting for them to expire.

A few preferences, in your browser’s local storage. They stay on your machine and are never transmitted:

• hts-themelight or dark, if you overrode your system setting
• hts-viewwhich deck layout you chose
• hts-nl-donethat you subscribed, so the prompt stops
• hts-nl-xwhen you last dismissed the newsletter prompt
• hts-nl-pvpages seen this visit, so the prompt is not immediate
• hts-nl-shownthat the prompt already appeared this visit

You can erase all of it from the storage page, or by clearing site data in your browser. Nothing breaks; the site forgets your theme and starts asking about the newsletter again.

The provider is EmailOctopus, who hold the list under their own policy. Nothing reaches them until you press the button: their code does not run on this site, no script of theirs is loaded on any page, and until you submit the form they do not know you were here.

The only thing collected is the address you type. No name is asked for and none is required. Subscribing takes two steps, because they send a confirmation email and nothing is sent until you click the link in it, so nobody can put your address on the list but you.

One preference is stored on your device when you subscribe, so the signup prompt stops appearing. It is listed on the storage page with the rest.

The site runs on a server I rent and administer myself, rather than a platform. Like every web server it writes an access log: your IP address, the page requested, the time, your browser’s user agent, and the site you arrived from if any. That is how a web server works and it happens whether or not you accept analytics.

I do not join those logs to anything, build profiles from them or share them. They exist so the thing can be kept running and defended when something goes wrong.

Every play links to the article it came from, on somebody else’s site. Following one takes you off here and into their privacy policy, which will very often be less restrained than this one.

UK GDPR gives you rights over personal data held about you. Unless you have subscribed, I hold none, so there is nothing to access, correct, export or delete. If you have, the address is yours to withdraw at any time using the unsubscribe link in any issue, or by emailing me.

This is a site about launching software products. It is not aimed at children and collects nothing from anybody.

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it in the same release, and the date at the top moves. There is no version history worth keeping yet because nothing has changed.

hello@howtheyship.net. I am the only person who reads it.