Privacy Policy

This is a personal research site. It has no public accounts, sells nothing, and shares nothing with advertisers. Most of what is here — publications, datasets, the fine tracker, the curriculum tools — can be read without the site storing anything about you beyond the request itself.

Cookies and tracking

Everything this site stores on your device falls into three categories. Nothing outside the essential category is stored or read until you choose, and you can change that choice at any time.

Essential (always on)

A record of your cookie choice, so you are not asked again, and an authentication cookie if you are one of the small number of people with an admin login. Neither builds a profile of you.

Analytics (off unless you turn it on)

If you turn this on, the site records which pages you read, what you click — including the visible text of the link or button, up to 100 characters — how far you scroll, how long you stay, which files you download, and whether you begin filling in a form and leave without sending it. Alongside each event it records your browser, operating system, device type, screen size, language, and the page you arrived from.

An approximate location (country, region, city) is derived from your IP address by the hosting provider, Vercel, and handed over with the request; your IP address is not sent to any third-party lookup service. That location is stored as ordinary text. The IP address itself is stored only as a one-way hash, never in plain text. If you do not turn analytics on, none of this is collected.

Preferences (off unless you turn it on)

Remembers optional interface choices between visits. Switching it off simply means the site forgets them.

Changing your mind, and Global Privacy Control

Withdrawing is as easy as consenting: use the Cookie preferences control here or in the footer of any page. Withdrawing stops collection immediately and clears the analytics identifiers that had been stored. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, it is treated as a standing refusal of everything non-essential: no banner appears and nothing optional runs.

There are no advertising cookies, and nothing here is sold or shared as those terms are defined under California law.

Research studies

Pages under /participate run research studies. Each study has its own consent form, which says exactly what it records; you see it before any question. Study pages never load the site analytics above, even if you allowed them elsewhere. Studies store no names, emails or IP addresses, only a random session identifier. If you arrive from Prolific, your Prolific ID is kept apart from your answers, used only for payment and to prevent repeat attempts, and deleted after 90 days. At the end of a study you receive a code that deletes everything you answered.

The Privacy Policy Analyzer

When you give that tool a policy (a web address, pasted text or a file), the text is sent to Google’s Gemini model through OpenRouter, on a route that keeps no copy of the text and does not train on it. The text and the result are stored so the analysis can be shown again. The result (the organization, scores and quoted passages) is published in the tool’s public dataset unless you untick that option; text you paste is never published.

To enforce the limit of ten analyses a day, we store a one-way hash of your IP address with each analysis you start. It cannot be turned back into the address, it is never published, and there is no account, email or link to your analytics session.

Please do not paste anything confidential or anything containing other people’s personal information. The tool is built for published policies, which are public documents by definition.

Research data on this site

The fine tracker, regulation summaries, data-broker registrations and headlines are compiled from public regulatory and news sources. They describe companies and enforcement actions, not visitors to this site.

Your rights, and getting in touch

You can withdraw consent at any time with the control above. If you would like to know what is held about you, or would like it removed, contact Mark Keith at mark.keith@gmail.com. Because analytics events carry no name or email and only a hashed IP address, it may not be possible to identify your records from a request alone; the surest way to remove them is to withdraw consent, which stops collection and clears the identifiers held on your device.

Related: the privacy research tools page, which is about privacy as a subject of study rather than about this site’s own practices.