What is kept, and why.
Written plainly, because a privacy page that needs a lawyer to read is not really telling you anything.
If you subscribe to the letters
Your email address, your first name if you gave it, which page you signed up from, the date, and a scrambled version of your internet address that cannot be turned back into the real one. That last one exists only to stop someone from signing up a thousand addresses at once.
It lives in a database on a server I run. It is used to send the letters and for nothing else. It is never sold, shared, rented or added to anyone else’s list. The only third party that touches it is the mail service that carries the letters from my server to your inbox.
Every letter carries a link that removes you at once, with no questions. If you would rather, write to me and I will do it by hand. When you leave, your address is marked as unsubscribed so that it is never emailed again, and it is deleted from the database within ninety days.
If you write to me
Your name, your address, and what you wrote are kept so that I can reply. I keep messages for as long as the conversation is alive and for a while afterwards in case it picks up again. Ask, and they are deleted.
If you download the Handbook
A note is kept of when it was sent to you, so that I can see how far it has travelled. Nothing more.
Just visiting
No third-party analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising cookies, no fonts loading from someone else’s servers. The site does count its own pages, on my own server, so that I can see which letters are read and where readers come from. For each page opened it keeps the page, the time, the site you came from if your browser says, whether the device was a phone, and a scrambled version of your address that changes every day and cannot be turned back into you. If you read a letter to the end, it notes that too. No cookie is set, and if your browser sends the Do Not Track signal the page is not counted at all.
The web server also keeps ordinary access logs for a short time, as every web server does, to catch faults and abuse.
The stories in the writing
This is a different kind of privacy and it matters more to me than the technical kind. The stories in the books and the letters are my own, or told with the permission of the people in them, or changed beyond recognition. If you ever recognise yourself in something here and were not asked, write to me and it will be taken down while we talk.
Who to ask
Gerard Antony, at hello@breadfortheroad.com. Ask me what is held about you, ask me to correct it, or ask me to delete it. Any of the three, at any time.