Your data,
explained

Article 1

Information I collect

This site may collect personal information through the following points of contact:

1. Newsletter signup: your email address, used to send updates about new releases, cover reveals, and occasional news. Where you sign up from one of the book ideas at the end of a reading guide, which idea it was is stored alongside it, so that I can write to the people who asked about that one rather than to everybody.
2. ARC request form: name, email address, platform, handle or URL, and an optional note, used to consider and respond to advance copy requests.

No other personal information is collected. This site does not use cookies, advertising pixels, or any third-party analytics or tracking service. The server keeps an anonymous tally of page requests, described in Article 5.

Article 2

How I use your information

Information collected through this site is used only for the purpose for which it was submitted:

1. Newsletter emails are used to send the communications you subscribed to. You may unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email.
2. ARC request submissions are used only to consider and respond to your request.

Your data is never sold, rented, or shared with third parties except where necessary to operate the relevant service. Newsletter emails are sent via MailerLite, whose privacy policy governs their handling of subscriber data.

Article 3

Data storage and security

Newsletter and ARC list details are held by MailerLite, which sends the email. The site itself runs on Railway. Neither the site nor its statistics database keeps a copy of your details.

I keep newsletter subscribers until they unsubscribe, and ARC list details until you ask me to take them off. Ask and I will.

Article 4

Your rights

You have the right to:

1. Request access to personal information held about you.
2. Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete information.
3. Request deletion of your personal information.
4. Withdraw consent at any time, where processing is based on consent.

To exercise any of these rights, please email me at lorraineh-writes@outlook.com. I respond to these within five working days.

If you're located in the European Economic Area, you may also have rights under the GDPR, including the right to data portability and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Article 5

Cookies, tracking, and site statistics

This site does not use cookies, advertising pixels, or any third-party analytics service. Nothing here follows you to other websites, and no data is shared with an advertising network.

The server does keep a simple record of requests, so I can tell whether people are finding the site and which search engines and AI assistants are reading it. Each entry holds only the date and time, the page requested, the family of browser it was requested with (Chrome, Safari, Firefox and the like, with no version, device, or operating system recorded), whether the request came from a person or an automated crawler, and the name of the site you arrived from, if any. Clicks on outbound links to Amazon, Goodreads and the books recommended in the reading guides are counted the same way. So is the button at the end of a reading guide that lets you say you would read a book I haven't written: pressing it records which idea it was and nothing else, it asks you for nothing, and pressing it more than once in a day still counts once. On longer pages the page also reports back when a quarter, a half, three quarters and all of it have been scrolled past, so I can tell whether the guides are read or just opened. That is four numbers and the page they belong to, with nothing tying them to each other or to you.

Two further things are noted about the request itself: whether it came from a phone or from something larger, and a two-letter country code where the service hosting this site provides one. The country is passed to the server already worked out, so the address it was derived from is never seen here and never written down. Both are the same kind of fact as the browser family above. Neither identifies you, and neither can link one visit to another.

Where you arrived from a link on another website, the address of that page is kept rather than just the name of the site, so I can find the post that mentioned this one. Anything after the question mark is removed first and never stored, which is where a search engine puts what you typed into the search box.

One value does tie a single day's requests together, so I can tell whether fifty page views were fifty people or one person reading fifty pages. Your address and browser are scrambled together with a secret number into a short code. That code cannot be turned back into your address, the address itself is never written down, and the secret number is destroyed and replaced every midnight. Once that happens today's code can never be matched to tomorrow's, so nobody can be followed here for longer than a day.

Beyond that, these records contain nothing that could identify you: no IP addresses, no cookies, nothing kept in your browser, and no device fingerprinting. They are totals, not profiles, and they are deleted after roughly a year.

The only browser storage in use is sessionStorage, which manages page transition animations and remembers which of those buttons you have already pressed, so they don't reset while you're still reading. It contains no personal data and is cleared automatically when you close your browser tab.

Article 6

Changes to this policy

This policy may be updated from time to time. The date at the top of this page reflects when it was last revised. Continued use of the site after any changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Article 7

Contact

For privacy-related questions, requests, or complaints, please email me at lorraineh-writes@outlook.com. I reply to privacy enquiries within five working days.