Privacy and ethics
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
I use Plausible analytics to get a high-level view of visitors to the site. This helps me understand my traffic and which pages people are viewing.
Plausible is recognised as the most privacy-respecting analytics solution. No personal data is collected.
I’ve made the dashboard public. You can see the data that I see at plausible.io/johnnydecimal.com. If you can’t see it there, neither can I.
Your email address
If you choose to give me your email address, I will treat it with the utmost respect. I’ll never spam you, or give it to anyone else.1
In 2019 I moved the mailing list from Mailchimp, whose business model had started to make me uncomfortable (and oh boy has it got worse since then) to Buttondown. It’s run by one guy who I trust to do the right thing. I’ve turned off all analytics features, so I don’t know who opens, clicks, or forwards my emails.
You should also check out the communications plan.
Cookies
No user-tracking cookies are used.
A/B testing
Occasionally I run A/B tests using Netlify’s Split Testing feature. This helps me figure out how best to develop the site.
Netlify places a cookie to record which branch you were assigned. Otherwise each page load would flip between branches. The cookie is called nf_ab
and is a random value between 0
and 1
. It is not linked to you personally in any way.
Ethics
We all know how bad the internet’s got: there’s even a word for it (NSFW).
I’ve been on the internet since 1994.2 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 crappy. 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.
Footnotes
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Someone wrote me once and said “well actually you are giving it to someone else, you’re giving it to Buttondown.” Don’t be like that guy; you all know what I mean. ↩
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Where I was
jen101@york.ac.uk
and used a terminal totalk
to other kids across the world. It was a miracle then and it remains so today. ↩