Like I'm 9
Most privacy policies are written to protect the company. This one is written so you can actually tell what happens when you read this site. It is short because the honest answer is short.
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The short version
You can read everything here without an account, without logging in, and without telling me who you are. I do not sell anything about you to anybody.
What gets collected automatically
Like essentially every website on the internet, the server that hosts this site keeps standard access logs. Those records include your IP address, the page you asked for, the time you asked for it, and what browser you used. This is how web servers work, and it is also what makes it possible to spot somebody attacking the site.
This site runs a security plugin for that second reason. It keeps its own log of suspicious requests and blocked attempts, which also involves IP addresses. It exists to keep the site from being taken over, nothing more.
This site also counts visits with a small analytics tool that runs on this same server. It does not use cookies, does not follow you to other sites, and the numbers never leave here. It tells me which pages people read, not who read them.
What you choose to give me
If you use the contact form, I receive whatever you typed into it, including your email address if you provided one. That comes to me as an email. I use it to answer you and to decide what to write about next. Writing to me there does not sign you up for anything. Only the email signup box does that.
The weekly email
If you sign up for the Scam of the Week email, the only thing I ask for is your email address. It goes straight to Kit, the email service that keeps the list and sends the emails. It is never stored on this website. The first thing you get is one email asking you to confirm, and nothing else arrives unless you click it.
Like most email services, Kit notes whether an email was opened and which links in it were clicked. I use that to learn which topics are actually useful, not to follow you around the web. Every email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom that works with one click, and you can also ask me to delete your address completely.
Your address is never sold, rented, or handed to anyone else. Kit has its own privacy policy for the part they handle.
Cookies
Reading an article does not require you to accept anything. The site stores one small preference in your own browser, which remembers whether you last read an article in plain mode or in geek mode, so it can show you the same one next time. That preference stays on your device and is never sent to me.
WordPress itself sets cookies for people who log in to write posts. That is me, not you.
Other companies
Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google to fetch them. Videos, when they appear here, are hosted on YouTube, so watching one involves YouTube in the normal way. Both of those companies have their own privacy policies and their own opinions about data.
At some point this site may carry advertising or affiliate links, since that is how a site like this pays for itself. If and when that happens, this page gets updated to say so plainly, and it will always be obvious which links those are.
How we use YouTube’s tools
The Like I’m 9 YouTube channel is run with a little help from YouTube API Services, the official tools YouTube provides so a channel owner can manage their own videos from their own software. We use them for exactly one thing: uploading, scheduling, publishing and tidying up the videos on our own channel (things like setting a release date, a title or a thumbnail).
Those tools only ever touch our channel. They do not see you, your YouTube account, what you watch, or anything about the people who view our videos. Nothing from YouTube is sold or shared with anyone. The access key that lets our software talk to YouTube sits on our own private server.
Watching our videos on YouTube means you’re using YouTube, so its rules apply: the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy. If you ever gave an app access to your Google account and want to take it back, you can do that anytime on your Google account permissions page.
What I will never do
- Sell or rent anything about you to anyone.
- Require an account to read something.
- Add you to the email list without you asking for it and confirming it.
- Publish a question you sent me without asking you first.
- Pretend a sponsored recommendation is an honest one.
Questions
If you want to know what I hold about you, or you want it deleted, just ask through the contact page and I will sort it out.