Privacy & cookies

The short of it

• Your address tells this site which city you are near and whose network you are on — a university, a company, a home broadband provider. That is the most it is used for, and the city is as fine as it gets.
• A random id in a cookie names your browser so a conversation with the guide can be continued. It says nothing about you.
• If you allow it, pages you open are counted — which page, which room, where you came from, how far you read — and your browser is asked, by name, what it is running on. It stays on this site's own server.
• If a page breaks in your browser, the page says so to this site's own server — which script, which line, and whether the page had to be loaded again. That is kept whether or not you allow counting, because it is how a fault gets fixed; it carries the script and the line, and the same random id the cookie already holds, nothing more.
• Nothing is fingerprinted. No canvas, no audio, no font or device probing, no reading of anything belonging to another site, ever.
• Nothing is sold, shared, or handed to an advertiser. There is no ad network here and no tracking across other sites.
• If you write to him, what you write is kept so he can answer it.

What is recorded, and why

A visit

The page you opened and when, the language and time zone your browser is set to, the size of your window, and the link you arrived from with any campaign tags on it. Purpose: knowing which of his work people come for.

Where you are, roughly

Your country, your state or region, and your city — worked out from your address, the same way any web server can. With it comes the city's own postcode and the coordinates of the city's centre, which are the city's and not yours: not your street, not your building, not your device. Your browser is never asked for its location. Purpose: knowing which parts of the world read him.

Whose network you are on

The name of the internet provider or the organisation your address belongs to, the network number it sits in, and the hostname the address answers to — all of it published, by them, in public registries and public DNS. It says “someone at a university” or “someone on a home broadband connection”. It does not say who, and no attempt is made to find out. Purpose: knowing what kinds of places his work reaches, and telling a crawler apart from a reader.

What kind of connection it is

Three plain flags, worked out from those same public registries and kept beside the rest: whether the address belongs to a VPN or proxy service, whether it belongs to a data centre rather than a home, a campus or an office, and whether it is a mobile network. Purpose: telling a crawler in a data centre apart from a reader.

The time zone your address implies

The time zone of the place the address is registered to — which is not the one your browser reports, and is kept beside it so that the two disagreeing reads as what it is, a VPN or a traveller, rather than being guessed at.

Your address

Used for the two things above and to apply the limits that keep the guide running. If you have not allowed the site's own counting, it is then discarded: only a salted hash is stored, the salt changes monthly, and an address cannot be recovered from an old row. If you have allowed it, the address itself is kept for ninety days and then erased automatically.

What your browser says about itself

Only if you allow the counting. Your languages, your time zone, the size and pixel density of your screen and window, whether you prefer a dark page or less motion, roughly how much memory and how many cores your device admits to, and what kind of connection it is on — plus the platform and version your browser publishes when a site asks for them by name. Every one of these is something your browser offers on purpose and may refuse; refusing leaves the field empty and nothing else happens.

Where you click

Only if you allow the counting. Where on a page a click landed, as a coordinate, with nothing identifying the person who clicked and no record of what they clicked on. Kept ninety days, then erased.

A fault

When a page breaks in your browser — a script that fails, a file that does not load, a page you had to load again — the page reports which script and which line to this site's own server, so the fault can be fixed. It is kept under the necessary cookies alone, filed under the random id the cookie already holds and nothing else about you, and is read apart from the counting above.

A private link

When somebody opens a document he shared as a private link, this site records that the link was opened: which link, when, which site the click came from, how far into the document the reader got, whether they downloaded it, whether the screen was a phone or a computer, and the country the network was in. It is kept whether or not you allow counting, because it is what the link is for, and it carries nothing that names you — no cookie, no address, and nothing that can be joined to any other page you have read here.

A conversation with the guide

What was asked and what was answered, with the record the model was given, so a wrong answer can be traced and corrected. Purpose: making the answers better. Kept twelve months.

A note sent from Contact

Your name, your address for a reply, and what you wrote — because he cannot answer otherwise.

Cookies

Three of the cookies below are needed for the site to work and are set without asking, because there is no site without them. The rest are yours to decide, and the decision is remembered for twelve months.

Open your cookie choices to change any of this. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, that is taken as a no to everything optional, and you are not asked again.

How long things are kept

• Counted page views and events: 180 days, then deleted.
• Your address, where you allowed the counting: 90 days, then erased.
• Where your clicks land, where you allowed the counting: 90 days, then erased.
• What a lookup said about an address, cached so the same address is not looked up twice in a week: 7 days. That cache holds nothing about a visitor — only facts about a network.
• Conversations with the guide: twelve months.
• Notes sent from Contact: until he has dealt with them.
• Totals — how many visits in a month, which pages — indefinitely, with nothing in them that points at a person.

The evaluation page

There is a second address, evals.troystefano.com, which is not part of this site. It is a private page that one named person — the academic dean who conducts the annual faculty evaluation — signs in to with a password, and it holds the faculty reports, the CV, the publications and the teaching record for that purpose alone. It is not indexed, it is not linked from here, and nothing on it is public.

No cookie notice is shown there. A notice asks permission to count a visitor who did not otherwise identify themselves; on that page the reader has signed in, no Google tag is loaded, nothing is shared with anyone, and the only record kept is that the page was opened and which sections were read — under his own signed-in visit, marked as that host, and never counted in any report of this site’s traffic. The sign-in cookie there is tsp_evals: a random id and nothing else, kept for thirty days, and revoked when he signs out.

What is never done

These are all things a site can technically do. This one refuses them, and it is worth saying which rather than leaving it to be assumed.

• No fingerprinting: nothing is drawn to a hidden canvas, no audio is generated and measured, no fonts or plugins are probed, no device is silently identified. Nothing you cannot see and cannot refuse.
• No precise location. Your browser's location permission is never requested; the city is as fine as anything here gets.
• Nothing belonging to another site is read, and nothing here follows you to one. No third-party cookies, no advertising pixels, no identity graph.
• No attempt is ever made to work out who you are from your address. The site classifies networks, never people.
• Nothing is sold, shared, or transferred — which is why Global Privacy Control changes nothing about what leaves here: nothing does.

Who else sees it

No one. Nothing here is sold, shared, or handed to an advertiser. Google Analytics is offered as a choice and is off unless you switch it on; if you do, Google receives what Google Analytics receives, and even then the advertising purposes stay switched off. The site runs no advertising of any kind.

What you can ask for

A copy of what is held about you, a correction, or its deletion — and, where you live in the EU, the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, to object to it being held at all. Where you live in California, the right not to have personal information sold or shared, which is honoured by default here because none of it ever is. Write from the Contact room and say what you want; the request is answered within thirty days.

Changes

If what is asked changes, the question is asked again rather than a previous answer being stretched to cover it.