Privacy, ethics, & AI

I'm just a nerd building a site for a thing that I personally find useful. So when I say that "I take your privacy seriously", it's not just some spiel. It's me, Johnny Noble, talking to you, my honoured guest.

Web trackers

I hate trackers more than you do. This site will never contain any third-party 'web trackers', i.e. code that attempts to uniquely identify you and follow you around the web.

It uses no external fonts, e.g. Google Fonts, or any other system that might provide a subtle way to track you.

Server analytics

People conflate 'analytics' with 'trackers', which is a shame. But the industry dug that hole for themselves, so here we are.

'Analytics' tells me, at a very high level, how many people visit this site, and which pages they view. This helps me spot broad patterns.

I use the open source GoatCounter for this. It doesn't track you in any way. It isn't recording that you visited this or that page. It just records that somebody did.

Many ad blockers will block these requests out of the box. If you'd like to do it explicitly, block jdcmal.goatcounter.com.

By the way, this has been possible since the first web server. Every server can show a log of the requests it's served, and that's essentially all that this is.

Your email address

If you choose to give me your email address, I will treat it with the utmost respect.

  • I send exactly four emails a year to my mailing list.

  • You're never signed up to the list just because you bought something. It's strictly opt-in.

  • I manage the list myself. No third parties are involved.

Cookies?

Nope. Not a one.

Ethics

We all know how bad the internet's become: there's even a word for it (NSFW).

I've been on the internet since 1994.1 So this makes me particularly sad.

Fortunately, I can do something about it. I can actively not make things worse; I can try to make them better.

So I promise that I will be over here in the good corner of the internet. There are no pop-ups; nothing that interrupts you as you read; no misleading marketing tactics. Nothing sleazy. We all know what that looks like.

I document this here so that you can call me out on it. If you see something you don't like, tell me.

AI

Every word on this site was written by either me or Lucy. All of our products are hand-made. I answer all messages personally and will never use AI to reply to a message.

I find ChatGPT and Cursor useful. At times, I've subscribed to both. So I'm not anti-AI.2 But if we ever produce a thing with significant AI input I'll make it explicitly clear (and update this notice) we never will! I don't even need to write that.

Footnotes

  1. Where I was jen101@york.ac.uk and used a terminal to talk to other kids across the world. It was a miracle then and still is. ↩

  2. See blog posts 0021 and 0041. ↩

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