What this site knows about you

The short version

There are no accounts here, no logins, no comment section, and no forms of my own. The site stores nothing in your browser: no cookies, no local storage, nothing that survives you closing the tab. That is why you have never seen a cookie banner on this site. There is no banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Three things do happen while you read, and the rest of this page is those three.

Counting readers

I use Vercel’s analytics to see whether anyone is reading. It records which page was viewed, the site you arrived from, your approximate country, and whether you were on a phone or a desktop. It is cookieless and aggregate. To tell one visit from two within a single day it works out a temporary identifier from the request and throws it away after twenty four hours. It does not know your name, it cannot follow you to other sites, and no profile of you is built or kept.

Alongside it I measure how quickly pages actually render on your device. That one is new, and it exists for a specific reason. The archive page is long, and I had only ever measured it on my own machine on a fast line. Timings from real devices are the only way to know whether it is slow for someone reading on a phone. Those timings are numbers about the page, not about you.

The newsletter

The subscribe box on the How I Work and Contact pages is Substack’s own form, loaded from Substack inside this page. Two things follow from that. Opening either page makes your browser contact substack.com, the same as visiting Substack directly, and that request carries your IP address as any web request does. And if you subscribe, it is Substack that receives your email address and Substack that holds the list. I deliberately keep no mailing list of my own.

I can see subscriber addresses in Substack’s dashboard. I use them to send the newsletter and for nothing else. I do not sell them, share them, or load them anywhere else. Substack’s privacy policy governs what Substack does with them, and every issue carries an unsubscribe link that works without asking me.

Hosting

The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps the ordinary web server logs every host keeps, including the IP address a request came from. They exist to serve the site and to stop abuse of it. I do not read them for anything else and I do not combine them with anything.

When you write to me

Email sent to press@projectinterloper.com reaches an ordinary mailbox and I keep correspondence, because a correction or a tip is part of the record of how a story was built.

If you write to me about something you saw or did, your name and anything that identifies you stay out of print unless you tell me otherwise first. I will ask before I quote you, and I will ask again before I name you. If you would rather I did not keep the correspondence at all, say so and I will delete it.

What this site does not do

No advertising and no ad networks. No tracking pixels, no social network buttons that report back, no data brokers, no fingerprinting. Nothing about you is sold, rented or shared. Nothing collected here is used to train anything. Apart from the two measurement scripts and the Substack box described above, this site loads no third-party code at all.

Asking me about your data

You can ask what I hold about you and ask me to delete it, wherever you live. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union that is a right you have rather than a favour I am doing, and the address below is the one to use either way. Write to press@projectinterloper.com.

If what this site collects ever changes, this page changes first and the date below changes with it.

Last updated: October 10, 2026.