Privacy

Who is responsible

This site is run by Daniël Etten in a personal capacity. I work at Microsoft, but this is not a Microsoft site and Microsoft is not the controller of anything described here. If you want something removed, corrected or explained, reach me through the links on the about page.

What the site does on its own

The pages are static files. There is no account system, no comment form, no newsletter and no advertising. Fonts are served from this domain rather than from Google Fonts, so reading a post does not quietly announce your visit to a third party.

The site is hosted on Azure Static Web Apps. Microsoft handles the request in order to serve the page and to protect the service, which involves processing your IP address and your browser's user agent. That happens for every request, before any choice of yours can apply to it, and it is the same processing any web host performs.

What is stored in your browser

Two things, both in local storage rather than in cookies, and neither one sent anywhere:

• theme, holding light or dark if you have used the switch in the header.
• cookie-consent, holding your answer to the analytics question and the date you gave it.

Clearing your browser storage removes both. The consent record goes with it, so the question comes back.

Analytics, only if you agree

I would like to know which posts get read and which ones nobody finishes, so this site can load Google Analytics 4. It is not loaded when you arrive. The script is fetched from Google only after you accept, which means a reader who says no, or who never answers, makes no request to Google from this site and is not seen by it at all.

After you agree, Google Analytics sets two cookies, _ga and a second one whose name begins with _ga_. Both last up to two years and hold a randomly generated number identifying your browser. From then on it records which pages you open, when, roughly where from, and which site sent you here. Your IP address reaches Google as part of making those requests. I see the results as aggregate counts, and I never see your name, your email address or anything you have not published yourself.

Advertising and personalisation permissions stay denied whatever you choose, so this data is not used to build an advertising profile through this site. Google Ireland Limited is the processor, and Google LLC in the United States may process the data on its behalf.

Changing your mind

Select Cookies in the footer of any page. The same two buttons come back, and rejecting after having accepted deletes the Google Analytics cookies from this domain as well as stopping any further measurement. Withdrawing is one click, the same as agreeing was.

Google publishes its own account of what the service does at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Legal basis and how long anything is kept

Analytics runs on your consent, and on nothing else. The hosting logs described above rest on the legitimate interest in serving and defending a website, which is Microsoft's processing to describe rather than mine. Analytics data is retained for as long as the retention setting on the Google Analytics property allows, and the consent record stays in your browser until you clear it or change your answer.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask for access to your personal data, correction of it, erasure of it, restriction of its processing, or a copy of it in a portable form, and you can object to processing. In practice I hold no data that identifies you, so most requests will end with me confirming there is nothing to hand over. Ask anyway if you want that in writing.

If you think I have handled this badly, you can complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, at autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl.

Links to other sites

Posts link out to Microsoft Learn, GitHub and other sources. Following a link puts you on someone else's site under their privacy terms, not these.

Changes

If this statement changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top of this page changes with it and the consent question is asked again rather than assumed.