What this site knows about you.
Most people who land here are already being looked at by the government, so a page about web analytics probably feels like the smallest thing in your week. Read it anyway. You should know what a website keeps before you type your name, or somebody else's, into it.
This is the whole list. What gets recorded, who else gets a copy, and how to make me delete it.
Loading a page
Every page you open gets written down on my own server: the URL you asked for, the time, the page you came from if the link told me, your browser and operating system, and your IP address. The IP gets turned into a city and a state by a database file sitting on that same server, so that part never leaves my machine. The IP itself is kept next to the row.
Two cookies come with it. One is called ahoy_visitor, lasts two years, and is a random string that ties your visits to each other. The other is ahoy_visit, expires after four hours, and marks one sitting. Neither has your name in it, because I never asked for your name. There's also an ordinary session cookie that handles signing in and the security token on forms.
No cookie banner on this site. A banner wouldn't change a word of the above. It would just make you click a button first.
The search box records what you typed
When you search this site, the words you typed get saved next to that visit. Not a count, not a category. The actual sentence.
Search "how much time will my husband get for wire fraud" and that sentence is now in my database, attached to a visitor ID, an IP, and a city. The search itself runs on my own server, so your question doesn't go to Google or anybody else to get answered. But it's written down here, and you should know that before you use it. If that bothers you, don't use it. The nav gets you to every page on the site without typing anything.
Who else sees your visit
Two services see your data when you use this site, and neither of them are surprising.
A content blocker stops Google Analytics, and every page here works fine without it.
What you hand over on purpose
Nothing on the public side of this site makes you give me anything. Every guide, every FAQ, every annotated
When you do fill something out, here's what lands in the database.
The box where you describe your situation is the most sensitive thing on this page. It sits in my database and it comes to my email. Even if I delete it from my database, it still exists in my email, and I don't own my email. I'm not a lawyer, so none of it is privileged. Write me anyway. Just write me knowing that. If it's really sensitive, let's just jump on a call.
Accounts, private links, and the tools
Insider Tools and the portal use a real account: your email, a password stored scrambled so I couldn't read it if I wanted to, and your name if you gave one.
An Inside Mail address is a row with the address itself, the label you gave it, and the register number you attached to it. The messages move through the email provider.
Vouch and the facility survey work the other way around. The link is the whole credential. Nobody writing a character letter and nobody filling out a survey ever makes an account, and I never ask them for one. Those pages stay out of search engines, they're not in the sitemap, and a revoked link and a link that never existed return the exact same page, on purpose, so nobody can go fishing. The letters themselves are stored, because storing them is the entire product.
Who I sell it to
Nobody.
If somebody with a badge asks
I have multiple companies and projects. I have lawyers. If someone asks me for something, they can ask my lawyer for something.
Getting shit deleted
Email me at [email protected] and I'll delete everything and anything about you. You don't have to explain why and I'm not going to ask.
If there's an email that already went out, it's out. And whatever Google has is Google's, so their controls are the only ones that touch it.