The honest corner

Privacy Policy (Short, For Once)

Effective: November 2026 · Written in plain English because nobody reads the other kind

TL;DR: No cookies. No third-party trackers. No ads, no fingerprinting, no data sale — not now, not ever, not even to our cousins in analytics. We count visitors the way beavers count logs: roughly, locally, and with the serial numbers filed off. Details below because the law (correctly) insists.

1. What we collect, honestly

This site runs a self-hosted, privacy-first visitor counter. When you load a page it records: the page path and referrer (so we know which page gets the eyeballs), browser type, device type, language, timestamp, and your IP address truncated to its first three octets (for example 203.0.113.0 — a neighborhood, not a house; individual devices are not identifiable from it). Additionally, one random anonymous identifier is stored in your browser’s local storage — not a cookie, never sent to other sites, purely so the counter counts visitors instead of reloads. That is the entire list. There is no secret paragraph.

2. What we never collect

Full IP addresses, names, email addresses, contact form contents (the form is decorative and submits nowhere — the healthiest retention policy in the industry), payment data (there is nothing to pay for), precise geolocation, cross-site identifiers, or anything at all from children under 13 (this site is not directed at children; if a under-13 CEO appears, we will be flattered and delete everything within reach, per COPPA).

3. Why we collect it

Three reasons: keeping the dam upright (capacity and uptime), defending against attackers (automated blocking of scanning and abuse — see section 3 of our Terms of Service), and feeding the ego (aggregate traffic statistics). Nothing collected here is used for advertising or profiling because there is no advertising apparatus to use it for.

4. Selling, sharing, and the word never

We do not sell or share personal information — now or ever — within the meaning of the CCPA/CPRA and the twenty-plus US state privacy laws. We do not use advertising processors. The only third party involved in this site’s operation is our own hosting infrastructure, which sees server traffic the way a lighthouse sees boats.

5. Your rights, honored without a forms marathon

If you are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, or any of the fine states with a privacy statute: you have rights to access, delete, correct, and opt out. In practice the data we hold is pseudonymous and truncated, so it likely cannot be tied back to you — but ask anyway and we will do the thing: inquiries@privatesystemsinc.com. No notarized affidavit, no dark-pattern maze.

6. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

We honor the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal. If your browser broadcasts GPC, this site disables its visitor-counter storage on your device — opt-out is the default setting of the river. You can also nuke the counter ID yourself at any time: your browser’s site settings → local storage → delete. The dam remains standing.

7. Retention

Counter records age out automatically after about thirteen months. Logs of blocked attacks live as long as the block exists. The beaver’s memory, legally speaking, is the same.

8. Security

Everything travels over HTTPS. The site sits behind automated attack detection and permanent blocking. We practice aggressive data minimization, which is the cheapest security control ever invented: you cannot breach what you did not store.

9. Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the effective date changes and we would put a banner up, except banners are a dark pattern and we have standards. Questions: inquiries@privatesystemsinc.com. We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice — it is a privacy policy with a mustache.