Privacy

Reading the site

There is no analytics service on The Duvalist. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Facebook pixel, no advertising network, no third-party fonts or scripts loaded from somewhere else — the typefaces are served from our own server precisely so that reading an article doesn’t announce you to anybody. Nothing is set in your browser to remember who you are, and there is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Our web server keeps ordinary access logs — the page requested, the time, the IP address the request came from, and the browser’s user-agent string. This is what a web server does by default and what makes it possible to notice an outage or an attack. They are not joined to anything else, not used to build a profile, and rotate on the usual schedule.

Maps are drawn with tiles from OpenFreeMap, so your browser requests those tiles directly from them when you look at a map. That is a request to somebody else’s server and it is governed by their policy, not ours. We chose them partly because they operate without the tracking that the commercial map providers build in.

The newsletter

If you subscribe, we store your email address, the date, and where you signed up from. You confirm by clicking a link, so we also know the confirmation happened. That is the whole record.

Our emails contain a one-pixel image that tells us an issue was opened, and links that pass through our server before going where they were going, which tells us a link was clicked. Both are common practice and both are worth naming plainly rather than burying: they mean we can see that you opened an issue and which links you followed in it. We use it to tell whether an issue landed, nothing more. Open figures are approximate anyway — privacy proxies inflate them, image blocking deflates them — and we treat them as such.

Every issue carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click without asking you anything. Unsubscribing keeps your address in a suppressed state, which is deliberate: it is what stops you being re-added if your address turns up in a later import. Ask us to delete it outright and we will, and then nothing suppresses it, so tell us which you want.

Writing to us

Mail sent to our published addresses arrives in a shared inbox that our editors read. Messages, their attachments, and our replies are kept so that a conversation still makes sense months later. We don’t use anything you write to us for any purpose other than answering it — no marketing list, nowhere else.

Contributors and staff

People who write for us have accounts, which means a username, a password we store only as a hash, and a session cookie while they are signed in. That cookie is strictly necessary for signing in and does nothing else. There is no public sign-up: accounts are created by an editor.

Who else sees any of this

Our email provider handles delivery of the newsletter and of mail sent to us, so they necessarily process addresses and message contents on our behalf. Our server runs at a hosting company. Those are the only two, and neither is given anything to use for their own purposes. We have never sold or shared reader data with anyone, and there is no arrangement under which we would.

How long we keep it

Subscriber records last until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion. Correspondence is kept while it is useful and then archived with the rest of the database. Server access logs rotate within weeks. Anything else is a by-product of running a website and is not kept on purpose.

Asking us anything about it

Write and ask. You can have a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected, or have it deleted, and you don’t need to give a reason or cite a regulation to ask. Our current address is on the About page.

If this page ever stops matching what the site does, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.