Privacy

The short version

This site collects no personal information from you. There are no forms here that send us your data. The newsletter runs on Substack: when you click Subscribe, you go to Substack and enter your email there, under Substack's privacy policy, not ours. We do not track you across the web, we do not use third-party analytics, and we do not sell anything to anyone. If you email us, we receive that message and keep it only to reply or to weigh your contribution.

The long version, in plain English

What we collect

• Nothing personal through this site. Every Subscribe button links out to our Substack publication. If you subscribe, Substack receives your email and manages the list; we never see it or store it here.
• Anonymous, aggregated request logs from Cloudflare, which hosts this site: page request counts, response codes, and broad geographic regions. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no personal information.

The interactive tools (the Build Plan and your reading progress) run entirely in your browser and send us nothing.

When you email us

If you email us (to send a Field Notes contribution, or to ask a question), we receive your email address and whatever you write, including anything you attach. That email lives in our inbox with Google, which runs our mail under its own privacy policy, the same way the newsletter lives with Substack. We use it only to reply to you or to consider your contribution. We do not add you to the newsletter, and we do not sell or pass on what you send. Ask us and we will delete it.

Why there is a newsletter

So we can write to you: the occasional note when we publish something worth your time, and updates as we add to the Builder's Stack. It is delivered through Substack, which owns the subscriber list and the sending.

Where things live

Your subscription, meaning your email and the fact that you signed up, lives with Substack under their privacy policy. This site holds none of it.

Build Plans you fill out at the Build Plan never leave your device. The form auto-saves to your browser's local storage so you can come back, and the export actions (PDF, email, Markdown) all happen locally. We do not store your Build Plan anywhere on our servers, by design.

Your reading progress (which chapters you have opened and marked done) works the same way: it lives only in your browser's local storage, never on our servers, and is never tied to you across devices.

How long we keep it

Apart from any email you send us, we keep nothing about you, so there is nothing on our side to hold or delete. An email you send sits in our inbox until we delete it, and you can ask us to remove it at any time. Your subscription is yours to manage on Substack.

Who we share it with

No one. We do not sell, rent, lease, or trade anything about you. Ever. An email you send us stays with us and goes no further; we will not add you to the newsletter or pass your note to anyone else.

Your rights

• Manage or delete your subscription. Use the controls in any Substack email, or your Substack account, to update or remove your email. Substack is the controller for the list.
• Unsubscribe. Every Substack email includes a one-click unsubscribe link.
• Ask us anything. Reply to any newsletter and ask. We will help where we can, though the email data itself lives with Substack.

If this policy changes

We will update the date at the top of this page and note what changed. The current version always lives at /privacy.

If there is a breach

The only personal data on our side is the email people choose to send us, which lives in Google's mail service under its security. The subscriber list lives with Substack. If either has an incident that affects you, they will notify you under their own policy and the law.