Privacy
This page lists what this site collects and where it goes. It was checked against the site's code on 12 October 2026. How long things are kept is my own rule, stated below.
The brief form
The form asks for your name, your email address and a description of your tech stack, and it can carry the service you chose. Sending it emails those answers to me. The site writes no database record for them. If the mail cannot be sent, the brief is appended to a file on the server so it is not lost, and the site's log says that it was kept. If the site's mail is not set up, the whole brief is written to the server's log instead.
The newsletter
Entering your address sends one email to it with a confirmation link, and stores nothing yet. The link works for three days. Your address and the time you subscribed go into a list file on the server only when you open the link and press the button on the page it shows, together with a scrambled fingerprint of the address. Your unsubscribe link carries that fingerprint, never the address, so the site can find your entry. Then the site emails you a welcome message and emails me a notice. The list is backed up nightly.
Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link. Opening it shows a confirmation page, and pressing the button on that page removes your address from the list. The server also records a scrambled fingerprint of the address (not the address itself) and the time, so that a confirmation link sent before you unsubscribed cannot subscribe you again. A fingerprint older than three days, the life of such a link, is cleared the next time anyone unsubscribes.
Your mail program or provider may also offer its own Unsubscribe button on a newsletter. Using it removes your address at once, without opening a page, the same as the link in the mail.
Every mail about the newsletter, the confirmation and the welcome included, shows my portrait, and a post announcement shows its cover image. Both load from antonshubin.com when you open the mail (unless your mail program blocks images), so this site's server sees that request, like any page view.
When I announce a post, the server also writes down, for each subscriber the mail server accepted the mail for, a scrambled fingerprint of the address (not the address itself) in a file next to the list, and one for everyone who was on the list that day. They let a send that stopped halfway be finished without mailing anyone the same post twice and without sending an old post to someone who joined later. The fingerprints stay in that file; nothing clears them on its own.
How long things are kept
Your address stays on the newsletter list until you unsubscribe. A brief reaches me as an email in my own mailbox. I keep it while we talk, and I delete it when you ask, together with any copy kept in the server file above. The nightly backups keep older copies for up to three months, so a deleted address or brief leaves them within that time.
The site sends its mail through my own mail server, Stalwart, on a Hetzner server in Germany. No outside mail service carries it.
Analytics and cookies
The site counts page views, how fast pages load, and clicks on links and buttons with Umami, an analytics tool I host myself and serve from this site's own domain. It also counts whether a written brief or a booking went through, and whether a post was read to the end. None of these include what you typed.
Umami is not loaded for known search and AI crawlers, or on the unsubscribe, subscription-confirmation and payment pages.
The site's own code sets no cookies.
You can switch the counting off for the browser you are reading this in. The choice is saved in this browser's local storage, so it lasts until this browser clears the site's data, and every other browser or device needs its own. Views counted before you press the button stay counted.
Visits from this browser are counted.
What your browser does
Project pages that show a GitHub star count ask GitHub's API from your browser, so GitHub sees your network address. The browser reuses the count for an hour and keeps it in local storage until a newer one overwrites it.
A page with an embedded video loads it from YouTube.
Cloudflare and the booking calendar
The site is served through Cloudflare, which sees every request to it.
The Contact page embeds the booking calendar from a separate booking host, which has its own handling of your data. That is out of scope here.
Abuse limits
To slow down bots, the brief form and the newsletter form each count sends per network address in the server's memory, and accept three an hour.
Questions
Write to hi@antonshubin.com.