Privacy¶
This site counts page views, so that I know whether anyone reads what I publish here. It does that with as little as I could manage: no cookies, no accounts, no advertising, and no identifier that follows you from one visit to the next or from this site to another.
What is measured¶
Page views are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics. Each page loads
one small script from static.cloudflareinsights.com, which reports the page
address, the referring address if you arrived by a link, your country, the
browser and operating system family, the device type, and how long the page
took to render. That report is sent back to this site, at
williamdemeo.org/cdn-cgi/rum, so the script itself is the only thing your
browser fetches from anywhere but here.
What I see is a table of counts: which pages were read, how many times, and roughly from where. I cannot see who read them.
What is not collected¶
No cookie is set, by this site or by the analytics. There is no identifier that persists between visits, so two visits from you are not linked to each other, and nothing about you reaches a company other than Cloudflare.
That last point is worth stating exactly rather than generously. Fetching the
one script does tell the host it comes from, static.cloudflareinsights.com,
what any request tells any server: your IP address, your browser's user agent,
and that you were reading a page on this site. I checked in a browser rather
than assuming, and what that host receives is Referer: https://williamdemeo.org/
alongside the usual. It is not a new party, because that host is Cloudflare
and Cloudflare is already serving you this page; but "no cookie" is not the
same as "nothing crosses", and only the first of those is true.
Cloudflare states that the beacon script "does not store any data in the browser or access any storage data", that it does not fingerprint individuals "via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data", and that it "discards the IP address at the nearest Cloudflare data center and does not store it". Nothing is sold, and there is no advertising network involved.
The one thing this site does store¶
Which of the light and dark themes you are reading in, under a __palette
key in your browser's localStorage. The theme toggle writes it so that your
choice survives to the next page, and the first page you load writes the
default. That is a preference, not an identifier: it stays in your browser,
it is never sent anywhere, and clearing your site data forgets it. It is the
only thing this site stores: there is no sessionStorage entry and no
IndexedDB database either, measured in a browser rather than assumed. Your
browser keeps its own cache and history, as it does for every site, and that
is the browser's business rather than mine.
Who can see it¶
I can, in the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare can, because Cloudflare serves this site: every request for every page already passes through it, which is why the analytics add no company to the exchange that was not in it.
How to opt out¶
Block static.cloudflareinsights.com, in your browser's settings or with any
content blocker. Nothing on this site depends on that script, and every page
looks and works exactly the same without it; a blocked reader is simply not
counted.
What is true regardless¶
Any web server sees the requests it answers. Cloudflare receives the page you asked for, your IP address and your browser's user agent simply by serving the page, as every host does, and its own logs are separate from the analytics described above. The only way to avoid that is not to visit, which is a fair choice and one I would rather state plainly than bury.
Everything else¶
No third-party fonts, stylesheets or scripts other than the one beacon named above; the fonts, the mathematics renderer and the code highlighting are all served from this site. There are no comments, no forms and no newsletter, so there is nothing here that could collect your address. If you email me, I have your email; that is between us, and I do not add it to any list.
Questions about any of this are welcome on the contact page.