Privacy
What this site collects, and why.
The short version: page visits, an anonymized location and ISP, and how long you spent on each page. No third-party trackers, no ad networks, no cross-site profile.
What's collected
Each pageview
When you load a page, the site records the path you visited, the page that referred you (if any), the timestamp, your browser's user-agent string, the viewport size, and a random-per-pageview ID used to measure how long the page stays visible. None of that is shared with anyone outside this site.
Approximate location
Your IP address is sent to IPInfo to look up the city/region/country and the organization or ISP that owns the address (Comcast, AT&T, a university, a hosting provider). The result is stored on the visit record. The IP itself is never stored in plain form — only a one-way hash, salted with a private key, so individual visitors stay anonymous while still being countable as distinct.
A first-party cookie
One jh_vcookie is set so a visitor's pageviews can be grouped into a session timeline. It expires after a year. It is HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax. No cross-site use.
What's not
No Google Analytics. No Meta Pixel. No advertising trackers, no third-party fingerprinting, no fonts loaded from a tracker network, no embedded social widgets that phone home.
I never sell visitor data. There is nobody to sell it to.
Visits from logged-in admin sessions (mine) are excluded at the ingest layer so I'm not reading my own footsteps. Visits from clients sending the standard DNT: 1 Do Not Track header are skipped before any row is written.
Retention + access
The visit record is held in a Postgres database hosted on Neon, encrypted at rest and in transit. Only the site owner has access. Records are retained for as long as they're useful to the site owner; older entries can be removed on request.
Newsletter subscriptions are kept until you unsubscribe. The unsubscribe link in every letter works without sign-in.
If you want a record of yours deleted, or you want to know what the site has on file for you, email johnhowrey@gmail.com.
Questions about this page belong in an email.