Privacy policy

Reading an article requires no account and no personal information. We do not sell data, we do not build profiles of readers, and nothing that could identify you is stored in order to show you an article.

Two things could change that picture, and both are described in full below: analytics, which measures which pages are read, and advertising, which is not running today but is how the site is intended to be funded. Neither operates without your consent where consent is required.

This site is operated by WattCurious. For any question about this policy or about data relating to you, write to hello@wattcurious.com or use the contact page.

Delivery and security logs

Serving a page necessarily involves receiving a request. Our hosting and delivery infrastructure records standard request information — IP address, user agent, the URL requested, the time, and the response status — and retains it for a limited period to keep the site available, investigate faults and identify abuse. This is not used to build a picture of individual readers.

Messages you send us

If you use the contact form, we receive the name, email address, subject and message you enter. We use them to answer you and for nothing else: no mailing list, no onward sharing. We also store a one-way, salted hash of the sending IP address — enough to spot repeated abuse, not enough to identify a reader — and the submission time.

Analytics

Aggregate analytics tell us which articles are read, which is how we decide what to write next. We use Umami, which we run ourselves on the same server as this site. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, and creates no identifier that could follow you between visits or to any other site. What is recorded is the page, the referring page, and coarse device and country information derived from the request and then discarded. Because there is nothing to consent to storing, it runs without a consent prompt.

The site also contains a dormant integration with Google Analytics 4. It is switched off, no Google measurement script is requested, and if it is ever switched on it will load only after consent has been given.

Advertising

No advertising runs on this site today. When advertising is introduced, it is intended to be served through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners may then set or read cookies and similar identifiers on your device and process data to deliver and measure ads, and in some configurations to personalise them.

Where consent is required — including for readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland — those cookies are set only after you have given it through a Google-certified consent management platform. Details of what is stored, and how to change your answer later, are on the cookie policy page.

Your theme preference

If you switch the site between light and dark, that choice is saved in your browser’s local storage. It is not a cookie, it is never sent to a server, and clearing your browser data removes it.

The site implements Google Consent Mode v2 with every storage purpose — analytics, advertising, ad personalisation and ad user data — set to denied by default. That default is applied by the first script in the page, before any measurement or advertising code could run.

Consent is collected by a Google-certified consent management platform. We deliberately do not use a hand-built banner for advertising consent: a custom banner is not certified, and relying on one would not be compliant however carefully it were written.

We use service providers to run the site, and they process data on our behalf or, in the case of advertising, as independent controllers:

• Hosting and content delivery — to serve pages and keep them available.
• Google Analytics — only where analytics is enabled and consent has been given.
• Google AdSense and its advertising partners — only once advertising is introduced, and only within the consent you have given.
• A Google-certified consent management platform — to record and honour your consent choices.

These providers may process data outside the country you are reading from. Where that happens, the transfer relies on the safeguards those providers publish for international transfers.

• Delivery and security logs — a short period, for troubleshooting and abuse investigation.
• Contact messages — until the matter is resolved, plus a reasonable period in case you follow up.
• Analytics and advertising data — according to the retention settings of the provider concerned, which are documented by them.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access personal data relating to you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to its processing, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time without affecting what was done before you withdrew it.

Consent for analytics and advertising can be changed at any time through the cookie preferences control, and cookies can be cleared or blocked in your browser. For anything else, write to hello@wattcurious.com. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to your local data protection authority.

This site is written for a general adult audience and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Material changes — particularly the introduction of advertising — will be described here before they take effect.