What the site keeps, and why

If you sign up for email

When you give your address in one of the site’s forms (the newsletter, the opening chapter, or “Notify me” on an edition), the site keeps:

• your email address;
• what you asked to hear about: the newsletter, or one particular edition;
• the page you signed up on, and when.

It is used for one thing: emailing you about what you asked for, and nothing else. Before anything is sent, you will get a single email asking you to confirm; if you don’t, nothing more follows. Every email has a link to unsubscribe. Your address is never sold, rented or given to anyone.

If you make an account

An account keeps your email address, your plan, and when you joined. Your password is kept by Supabase (below) only as a one-way hash: no one, the author included, can read it. A sign-in link sent by email works once, within the hour.

Making an account doesn’t add you to the mailing list; that is only ever your choice, in its own form. To close your account and delete everything tied to it, write to the address at the end of this page.

Cookies and your browser

• Sign-in cookies, set only when you sign in. They keep you signed in, and one tells the page whether to offer “Sign in” or your account. They do nothing else.
• Your light or dark setting, kept in your own browser. It is never sent anywhere.

There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Players from other sites

Some of the things on the Library’s Recommended page can play right there: a video from YouTube or Vimeo, or music and podcasts from Spotify, Apple or SoundCloud. Nothing loads from those services until you press play. Once you do, the player is theirs: they see the visit, may set their own cookies, and follow their own privacy policies. YouTube plays in its privacy-enhanced mode. The pictures on that page are copies kept with the site, so viewing it contacts none of them.

Counting visits

The site counts page views and clicks, to see which pages are read and what gets used. For each, it notes the page, what was clicked and where it leads, the site that linked you here, whether you’re on a phone, tablet or computer, and whether you’re signed in. Never who you are: it sets no cookie for this and keeps no IP address. Each visit is counted under a code made fresh each day from your browser’s address and type, which can’t be turned back into either and changes at midnight (UTC), so one day’s visits can’t be linked to the next. The counts are kept for 13 months.

If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, the site doesn’t count you at all.

Vercel Web Analytics also counts page views, without cookies, recording which pages are visited, not who visits them.

Who handles it

A few services run the site, and see only what they need to do it:

• Supabase stores reader accounts, the mailing list, the visit counts and the site’s audio, and sends the emails that confirm an account or sign you in.
• Vercel hosts the site. Like any web server, it sees the IP address of each visit.
• Cloudflare plays the site’s video.

Your data, your call

To see what the site holds about you, correct it, or have it deleted, write to loremaster@loretopia.ai. It will be done, and you will hear back, within 30 days.

Children

The site isn’t meant for children under 13, and doesn’t knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

When something here changes (when newsletters start going out, for example), this page changes first, with a new date at the top.