Privacy ಖಾಸ್ಗಿಪಣ್ खाजगीपण

This page says what this site collects, what it stores, and who else sees anything. It was written by reading the site's own code rather than from a template, so where the answer is "nothing" it says nothing.

Reading the archive

You can read almost all of this site without giving us anything. There is no analytics, no tracking pixel, no advertising network and no social-media script on any page. The fonts are served from this site, not from a font service.

Cookies

Four, and only these four. The first three are needed for the site to work and are set whatever you choose:

ashawadi_session – two hours. It remembers which script you are reading in, whether you are signed in, and the state of any form you are part-way through.
XSRF-TOKEN – two hours. A security token that stops another site submitting a form here in your name.
A sign-in cookie – one year, and set only if you sign in. It is what saves you signing in again on that device.

The fourth is set only when you answer the cookie notice:

ashawadi_consent – six months. It holds one word, accepted or rejected, and nothing else: no identifier, no date, nothing about you. Its only purpose is so that you are not asked the same question on every page. The same six months applies whichever way you answered.

Your chosen reading size is kept in your own browser's local storage. It is never sent to us.

Signing in to read a gated page

Some pages ask for an email address before the whole text is shown. There is no password. You type an address, we email a six digit code, and you type the code back.

We store your email address, when you confirmed it, when you were last here, how many times you have signed in, and which page you signed in from. While a code is live we also store the address it went to, a one-way hash of the code, when it expires, how many times it has been tried, and the internet address the request came from. The code and its record are discarded once used or expired.

Every email we send carries a link that both stops the emails and lets you ask to be removed. Removal is done by a person, not a machine, and everything held about you is deleted.

The contact form and the feedback form

Both store what you type – your name, your email address, a phone number if you give one, the subject, and your message – together with the internet address you sent it from, and both send him a copy by email. The phone number is optional and everything else is what he needs in order to reply. Nothing from these forms is used for anything but replying to you.

Videos

Where a page shows a video, what loads with the page is a still picture and a play button, not a player. The picture comes from a Google server (i.ytimg.com), so Google can see that a browser at your internet address asked for that picture. It sets no YouTube cookie.

If you press play, and only then, a YouTube player loads from youtube-nocookie.com. From that moment YouTube receives your internet address, information about your browser, and which video you are watching, under Google's privacy policy rather than this one. Nothing loads it for you.

Advertising, and the choice

There is no advertising on this site today, and no advertising script is loaded on any page.

If that changes, it will be Google AdSense, in three places: below the sidebar, above the footer, and at the end of an article. It will never appear inside the text of a piece.

You will be asked first. Until you press Accept, no advertising script is requested and no advertising cookie can be set – the page the server sends you does not contain it, so there is nothing for your browser to fetch. If you press Reject, the same is true for six months, and the whole site works exactly as it does now: everything is readable, search works, signing in works, and nothing is withheld from you for refusing.

If you do accept, Google and its partners may set cookies or read a device identifier in order to choose which advertisements to show you and to count who saw them, and may use what they already know about your browsing on other sites to do it. That is described in how Google uses information from sites that use its services, and you can turn personalised advertising off at Google's My Ad Center. Readers in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area will be asked to consent through Google's own consent message before any of it is set.

Changing your mind

Press Cookies in the footer of any page. That clears the answer we hold, brings the notice back, and puts you back to having said nothing – which means no advertising script loads until you answer again.

What it cannot do is delete cookies Google has already set. Those belong to Google's own web addresses and this site cannot read or remove them, and any button here claiming otherwise would be making a promise it cannot keep. What it does is stop them being set or renewed. To remove the ones already there, use your browser's own setting for clearing site data, or Google's controls linked above.

What the server keeps

The web host records ordinary access logs – the page asked for, the time, the internet address and the browser – as every web server does. The site's own error log records what went wrong when something goes wrong. Neither is used to build a picture of a reader, and neither is given to anybody.

What we never do

We do not sell or rent anything about you. We do not share your address with any other organisation. We do not use it for anything you did not ask for. There is no mailing list.

Asking what is held, or asking for it to be deleted

Write to him through the contact form, or follow the removal link in any email from this site. He will answer, and a deletion is a deletion.