Privacy
Baithak writes about systems that quietly extract from people, so it would be a poor look to run unexplained trackers while doing it. Here is everything, in plain sentences.
The short version
Visitor numbers are counted without cookies and without following anyone between visits. Nothing is stored on your device, so there is no cookie banner to dismiss. If you subscribe, your email address is stored so essays can be sent to it, and nothing else. No session recording, no adverts, no data sold, no data brokers, ever.
What runs on this site
PostHog — page views and interactions
Which pages are read, how far down an essay people get, which topics get filtered for, what gets searched. Run in cookieless mode: nothing is stored on your device and there is no identifier tying one visit to the next. Your IP address is not recorded. Data is held in the EU.
Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights
Aggregate page views and page-loading speed. Cookieless. Used to keep the site fast.
Resend — the newsletter
Sends the emails, and records whether a message was delivered, opened and whether a link in it was clicked. Open tracking works with a small invisible image; many mail apps load it automatically whether or not you read anything, which is why that number is treated as unreliable here.
What is never collected
Email addresses are never sent to any analytics tool. Where an event needs to know that two things involved the same subscriber, a one-way scrambled version of the address is used instead, which cannot be turned back into an address. The message you write in the contact form and any comment left as feedback stay on Baithak's own server and go nowhere else. No advertising or cross-site tracking scripts run anywhere on this site.
If you subscribe
Your email address, the date you subscribed and which page you subscribed from are stored in a database (Upstash Redis) so that new essays can be sent to you and so the same essay is never sent twice. That is the entire record.
Every email has a working unsubscribe link, and one click removes you completely. You can also ask to be removed, or to be told what is held about you, and it will be done.
How to opt out
Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser and no analytics will run at all. That preference is honoured here, which is not legally required in most places, but ignoring a clearly stated wish would be a strange thing to do.
An ad blocker will also stop all of it, and nothing on the site will break.
Contact
Anything about this page, or any request about your data, goes to Mayank Singhal via the contact form.
This page is updated whenever a tool is added or removed, not on a schedule.