How this tool handles your data

The short version

• ·Your quiz answers stay in your browser tab. They are not sent to a server, and they are gone when you close the tab.
• ·There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no advertising tag and no third-party tracker on any page of this site. We do count visits, on our own server, without cookies.
• ·We set no cookies. That is also why you were never shown a cookie banner.
• ·If you give us your email address, we store your address, your score and your heaviest category. Nothing else.

What happens when you take the check

Every question, every weighting and all of the arithmetic ship to your browser as part of the page. Your answers are held in sessionStorage, a per-tab store that the browser clears when the tab closes. The server that sent you this page never learns what you answered, because the answers are never transmitted to it.

You can verify this rather than take our word for it: open your browser developer tools, switch to the network tab, and take the check. No request carries your answers.

If you ask for your report by email

We store three things: the email address you typed, the score the tool calculated, and which of the four categories came out heaviest. Not your individual answers, not your IP address, not your device. They sit with Kit, the company that sends the mail on our behalf, and go nowhere else.

We keep them until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them, whichever comes first. There is no other schedule and no archive behind it: unsubscribing removes you.

Receiving the report and joining the mailing list are separate choices. The mailing list has its own checkbox, it is never pre-ticked, and declining it does not stop you receiving your report.

Every email we send identifies who it is from, describes itself honestly in the subject line, and carries a working unsubscribe link. Unsubscribes are honoured immediately and in every case within ten business days, as the CAN-SPAM Act requires.

Seeing, moving or deleting what we hold

This site is run from Belgium, so the GDPR applies to what we do with your address regardless of where you live. Residents of California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and a growing number of other US states have comparable rights under their own laws. We apply the same standard to everyone, because maintaining two would be more work than honouring the higher one.

You can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, hand it to you in a portable form, or delete it. You can withdraw your consent to the mailing list at any time, and doing so does not affect anything we sent before. Our legal basis is your consent: you asked for the report, and the mailing list was a separate tick.

Email privacy@joerihostyn.com from the address in question and ask. We will tell you what we hold, or delete it, within thirty days. We do not sell or share personal information with third parties, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

How we count visitors

We run Umami on a machine we own. It records that a page was viewed, roughly where in the world from, and which site sent you. It sets no cookies, assigns you no identifier, and cannot follow you to any other website. Nothing it collects reaches a third party, because there is no third party involved.

We use it for one thing: seeing which of the twelve questions people stop at, so the check can be made shorter where it deserves to be. Writing about surveillance while running someone else's analytics would have been the easier choice and the wrong one.

Age

This tool is intended for people aged 16 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us information, write to privacy@joerihostyn.com and we will remove it.

Who is responsible for this

Joeri R. Hostyn, writing from Belgium, is the data controller. Reach us at privacy@joerihostyn.com.

Because the site is run from the EU, the GDPR governs what we do with your data, and it applies whether you are reading this in Ohio or in Ghent. Most of the readers we write for are in the United States, so we also follow CAN-SPAM and the state privacy laws that apply there. Where two rules differ, we follow the stricter one. If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your own data protection authority; in Belgium that is the Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.