Privacy Policy

This is a static website. It has no accounts, no comment system, no advertising, and no mailing list. It has one contact form, it counts visits with Cloudflare's cookieless analytics, and it uses Google Analytics only if you agree to it. All three are described below.

What this site collects

Personally, only what you type into the contact form, and only when you choose to send it. Beyond that, the site keeps anonymous visit statistics, described under Analytics below. There is no account system, no reading history tied to you, and no data gathered for advertising or sale.

Analytics

Every visit is counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, a privacy-focused service from the company that hosts this site. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, and doesn't fingerprint or track you across sites. It records which page was viewed, the referring site, your browser and device type, the country derived from your IP address, and how quickly the page loaded, and it reports these only as aggregate statistics. It runs whether or not you accept the banner below, because it doesn't identify you.

Beyond that, this site can use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages are read — but only if you agree. On your first visit a banner asks. Until you accept, the Google tag is never loaded: no analytics cookies are set, and no request is made to Google at all, so nothing about your visit reaches them. Declining is a single click, and the site works exactly the same either way.

If you do accept, the tag sets cookies and reports information about your visit — pages viewed, approximate location derived from your IP address, browser, device type, and referring site — to Google, which processes it under its own privacy terms. It is used to understand what people read, not to identify individuals, and the data is not sold or combined with anything else collected here.

Your answer is remembered in your browser's local storage, not in a cookie. You can change it at any time with the Cookie choices link in the footer of any page; withdrawing consent deletes the analytics cookies and reloads the page. Ad and tracker blockers and Google's opt-out add-on all work as well.

The contact form

The contact form on the contact page asks for your name, email address, an optional subject, and your message. When you send it, those are delivered by email to the site's own inbox and are kept only for as long as needed to correspond with you. They are not added to a mailing list, sold, or shared, and they aren't stored in a database — there isn't one.

The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a submission comes from a person rather than a bot. Turnstile receives your IP address and some technical signals about your browser to make that assessment. Cloudflare states that it does not use this for cross-site tracking or advertising. Mail is then sent through Cloudflare's email service.

What the host records

The site is served by Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes standard request data — IP address, browser user-agent, requested page, and timestamp — in order to deliver pages and protect the service from abuse. This is handled under Cloudflare's own privacy terms, and it is not used here to build a profile of you.

Fonts

Typefaces are served from this site itself. Loading a page makes no request to a font service such as Google Fonts.

Links to other sites

Links to booksellers such as Amazon, and to social profiles such as X and Facebook, take you to services with their own privacy practices, which govern once you leave this site. These are plain links: no affiliate tracking, referral codes, or commissions are attached to them, and no widgets, embeds, or tracking scripts from those retailers or social networks run on this site. When you follow a link away from here, your browser tells the destination only that you came from simonrook.com, not which page you were reading.

Where this data goes

Nothing collected here is sold, rented, or shared for advertising. The only third parties involved are the ones named above — Google, for analytics if you accept it, and Cloudflare, for hosting, visit statistics, spam checking, and delivering form mail — each acting under its own privacy terms. Analytics data is retained by Google according to the property's settings; contact-form mail is kept in an ordinary email inbox for as long as the correspondence is useful, then deleted.

Children

This site is intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes — for instance, if a newsletter is ever added — the revised version will be posted here with a new date above.

Contact

Questions about this policy can go through thecontact form.