Privacy
Plain English, because a policy nobody can read protects nobody. Last updated .
Who runs this site
Plain Reckoner is a one-person publication and is the data controller for everything described here. The operator is contactable at contact@plainreckoner.com, which is monitored, and is identifiable on request to anyone with a legal reason to ask — including a supervisory authority.
The short version
- You can read every page here without giving us anything at all.
- Page views are counted without a cookie and without anything that identifies you.
- We only email you if you asked twice — once in the form, once by clicking a link we send you.
- Advertising on this site is served by Google, which sets its own cookies. That is described below, and in the EEA and UK you are asked first.
- We have never sold data and the business does not have a version of itself where that makes sense.
What we collect, and why
When you read a page
A page view is counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics: the page, the referrer, a country and a device type. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and uses no cross-site identifier, so there is nothing that follows you between visits or between sites. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in knowing whether anybody reads this (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).
When you subscribe
Your email address, the page you subscribed from, the exact wording you agreed to, and the date. The list lives in our own database, not a newsletter provider's. We store a one-way hash of the address, plus the address itself — which is unavoidable, because mail cannot be delivered to a hash — and an unconfirmed signup deletes itself after 48 hours. Resend puts the message on the wire and receives one address at a time to do it; it never holds the list. The legal basis is your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), and you can withdraw it at any time from the link in every email.
When you use the dashboard
The dashboard at /app/ works entirely in your browser. Nothing you type there is sent to us, and there is no account to make. It does now keep two things on your own device so that coming back does not mean starting again: the figures you typed, and a list of the sites you pointed the inspector at with the number of findings for each.
That data never leaves your browser — we cannot read it, and there is nothing on our side to delete. You can remove all of it at any time with the “Forget everything” control on the dashboard, or by clearing site data for this domain. Your browser may also remove it without asking: Safari deletes script-written storage after seven days of use without a visit to the site, and any browser may discard it when the device is short of space.
Separately, the figures you type appear in the address bar so a result can be shared as a link — which means they are also in your browser history, on this device, the same as any other page you visit.
When you come back to the dashboard, it reads the most recent site
you inspected once more — the public homepage and its
robots.txt, ads.txt and privacy policy — so it
can tell you what changed since you last looked. That request goes from
our servers to that site, exactly as it did when you first typed the
address, and nothing about it is stored on our side. It happens for one
site, only when the last reading is more than six hours old, and you can switch it off on the dashboard, beside the list
of sites.
When your browser reaches our server
Your IP address and the page you asked for reach Cloudflare, which serves this site. That is unavoidable — it is how the request arrives. We do not keep our own copy.
One exception: when you submit the subscription form, a hash of your IP address is stored with the consent record, as proof of where the agreement came from, and used to limit how many signups one address can make in ten minutes. The address itself is never stored.
If you ask us to look at your site
The calculator page offers to look at a site and write back. If you use it, we store the address of the site and the email address you gave us, for the single purpose of sending you that answer.
We also fetch one or two public pages of the site you named
— its homepage and, if it links to one, its privacy policy — the same way
any visitor would. Nothing behind a login, no crawl, and we identify
ourselves in the request as PlainReckonerAudit.
Your address is deleted once we have answered you. It is kept for as long as it takes to reply and not a day longer, and asking for a look does not add you to the mailing list — those are separate, and you would have to confirm the mailing list by email.
If you email us
Mail sent to contact@plainreckoner.com is stored so it can be read and answered — the sender, the subject, the date and the plain-text message. Not attachments, not formatting.
It is deleted after 90 days, automatically, on every message that arrives rather than by a scheduled job that could stop. If you would like something removed sooner, say so in the message and it will be.
Advertising
This site carries advertising served by Google AdSense. Google may set cookies or read device identifiers to select ads and measure them, and Google is a separate controller for that processing — what it does is governed by Google's own policy.
Third parties, including Google and its advertising partners, may be placing and reading cookies on your browser, or reading a device identifier, to select and measure the ads you see. This is data collection, sharing and usage that happens as a consequence of this site using Google products, and it is the only advertising processing that takes place here — there is no other ad vendor, no data broker and no audience list built from your visit.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland you are asked for consent before any advertising or analytics cookie is set, and refusing is a single click that costs you nothing on this site. You can change your answer at any time from the link in the footer. Outside those regions you can opt out of personalised advertising at Google My Ad Center.
Who else receives data
| Who | What for | What they get | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buttondown | Would have hosted the newsletter list — not used; we host it ourselves | Nothing. No data has ever been sent to them. | Not yet in use |
| Resend | Delivers the confirmation email and the newsletter itself | Your email address, and the contents of the email we send you | In use |
| Cloudflare D1 (our own database) | Holds the newsletter list — operated by us, not by a list host | A salted hash of your address, your consent record, and the address itself so we can send to it | In use |
| Google AdSense | Shows the advertising that pays for this site | Your IP address, device and browser, and advertising cookies where you allow them | In use |
| Google Privacy & messaging (CMP) | Asks for your consent before any advertising cookie is set | Your consent choice, stored in your own browser | In use |
| GoatCounter | Counts page views so we know which tools are used | Page URL, referrer, country, and a daily rotating hash — no cookie, no cross-site identifier | Not yet in use |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Counts page views so we know whether anybody reads this | Page URL, referrer, country and device type — no cookie, no storage, no cross-site identifier | In use |
| DigitalOcean | Runs the server this page was served from | Whatever your browser sends to reach us, including your IP address | Not yet in use |
Rows marked not yet in use are listed in advance so this page is never behind the site. Nothing is sent to them until the status changes.
How long we keep things
| What | Stored as | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Unconfirmed signup | A hash of your address, plus the plaintext held only until you confirm | 48 hours, then deleted automatically |
| Confirmed subscriber | A hash of your address, with the date and wording of your consent | Until you unsubscribe |
| Calculator inputs | The numbers you entered, with no identifier that points back to you | 24 months |
| Server logs | IP address and request line | 14 days |
| Which audio or video was played | The note, the voice, and how far in — no IP, no cookie, no identifier of any kind | 180 days |
| A ?ref= tag you arrived with | The tag and the page — no IP, no cookie, no identifier of any kind | 180 days |
| A free audit request | The site you asked about, your address, and a hash of your IP used only to stop one person filling the queue | Deleted the moment we answer you, and after 90 days even if we never did |
| A request for the data behind a page | Your address in plain — a person has to reply to it — the dataset you asked for, and a hash of your IP used only to stop one person filling the queue | Deleted the moment we send it, and after 90 days even if we never did |
Your rights
This site is operated from Brazil, so the LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, Lei nº 13.709/2018) applies to everything described above. Under it you may confirm that we process your data, access it, correct it, ask us to delete it, ask what we share and with whom, request it in a portable form, and withdraw consent at any time. Brazil's supervisory authority is the ANPD, and you can complain to them about us.
If you are in the EEA or the UK, the GDPR gives you the same set of rights, and you may complain to your own national data protection authority. If you are in California, the CCPA gives you the rights to know, to delete, and to opt out of sale — we do not sell data, so there is nothing to opt out of.
Email contact@plainreckoner.com and we will answer within 30 days. One honest limitation: because subscriber addresses are stored as hashes, we find your record by your address — so a deletion request has to come with the address it concerns. You can also complain to your national data protection authority.
How long we keep a record of your consent
If you unsubscribe we stop emailing you immediately — not within some number of working days. We do keep the record that you once consented, and its date and wording, for about three years. That is not us relying on your consent after you withdrew it: it is a separate legal basis (GDPR Article 6(1)(c) and (f)), because if anyone ever asks whether we had permission to email you, the only way to answer is to have kept the proof. We are telling you now rather than in a footnote later.
Children
This site is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Changes
The date at the top changes whenever this page does. Anything that materially changes what we collect will be announced in the newsletter before it takes effect, not after.