How this site handles your data.

The short version: as little as possible. No ad networks, no behavioural profiling, no fingerprinting. Two analytics tools to count visitors and see what’s read — both disclosed below — and an email address only if you choose to give one. That’s the whole list.

What I collect.

If you join the dispatch: your email address, and the date you subscribed. That’s it. The list lives with the email provider that powers the dispatch (their privacy policy applies to the storage and delivery; mine applies to anything I do with the list, which is limited to writing to it).

If you just visit: standard server logs (IP, user-agent, timestamp), retained for thirty days for security and debugging. The site also loads Google Analytics 4 to count page views and see which posts people read — that’s the one third-party script on this site. GA sets cookies, sends a record of your visit to Google, and receives a truncated version of your IP. I don’t use GA’s demographics or interest reports. The site honours Do Not Track requests, so if your browser sends DNT, no GA hit is recorded. You can also block GA at the browser level with any standard content blocker (uBlock Origin, Brave shields, Safari ITP) — the site works the same with or without it. The only other cookie is the one that remembers your theme preference; it’s set in your browser and never reaches the server.

The second analytics tool: alongside GA, the site runs a small first-party tracker I built and control myself — not a third-party product. It records page views (which page, referrer, screen width), a handful of click events (external links, YouTube clicks, email-address clicks), and whether you scrolled through most of an article (a single event once you pass 80% of the page, on articles long enough for that to mean anything) — to a private database. It sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser’s storage. Instead each visit is bucketed under a session identifier computed from a SHA-256 hash of your IP address, your browser, and the date — it rotates every midnight and can’t be reversed back to an IP or linked to any other record. It honours Do Not Track the same way GA does. I use it for the same reason as GA: which posts get read, how far people read, which links get clicked — nothing more granular than that.

What I don’t do.

I don’t sell, rent, or trade any of it. I don’t run ad networks. I don’t load third-party trackers beyond GA. I don’t use your data to train a model. I don’t buy mailing lists.

Your rights.

You can unsubscribe from the dispatch in one click — every email has the link, and the link works. If you want me to delete any record I hold of you, email robin@motorcycleseatwisdom.com and I’ll do it within a fortnight. If you’re in a jurisdiction with specific data-rights laws (GDPR, CCPA, the Australian Privacy Act, the New Zealand Privacy Act), the same email gets the same response.

Changes.

If this policy changes in any way that matters, I’ll say so in the dispatch before the change takes effect. The version of this page in Git history is the authoritative record of what was true and when.

Last updated 22 August 2026.