Policy
Privacy
What this site collects, why, for how long, and how to switch it off. Short, because there is very little to describe.
The short version
- This site sets no cookies.
- There are no advertising or social trackers. No pixels, no tag manager, no third-party ad scripts.
- There is no login, so there is no account data.
- Analytics: currently not enabled. No analytics script is loaded on any page of this site today.
- Newsletter: not open. No email addresses are being collected, and there is no signup form to submit.
What the web host necessarily sees
Serving a page requires receiving a request, so whichever host serves this site records standard access logs: IP address, timestamp, the page requested, referrer, and user agent. That is a technical necessity of the web rather than a choice we made, and it is used only to serve pages and investigate abuse or outages. We do not build profiles from it and do not combine it with anything else.
Analytics, if and when it is enabled
We may add privacy-preserving analytics. If we do, the only providers under consideration are cookieless and do not track individuals across sites — Plausible, Umami, or GoatCounter. Committed in advance, so this cannot quietly become something else:
- What we would measure: page views, referrer, country, and broad device type. Nothing else.
- Why: to learn which files people actually read to the end, and whether the sources section gets used. That changes what we publish next.
- What we would never collect: cookies, cross-site identifiers, fingerprints, full IP addresses in storage, or anything that identifies an individual reader.
- Retention: aggregate counts only, retained no longer than 24 months.
- Cookie banner: none, because a cookieless analytics setup with no personal data does not require consent — and if a provider ever did require one, we would change provider rather than add the banner.
How to block it anyway: any content blocker stops it, and the site works identically with it blocked. Nothing on this site is gated behind analytics loading.
The newsletter, if and when it opens
If a newsletter opens, we will store the email address you give us and the date you gave it, with a named provider disclosed on this page before the form goes live. One email per new file. No tracking pixels, no open-rate surveillance, no sharing or selling the list ever, and one-click unsubscribe that actually deletes the record rather than suppressing it.
Third-party content
Images are served from this site rather than hot-linked from elsewhere, which means viewing a file does not expose you to the original host. Fonts are self-hosted; nothing is fetched from a font CDN. Outbound links to sources are ordinary links, and once you follow one you are subject to that site’s policies rather than ours.
Email you send us
Mail to thestrangefile@gmail.com is held in an ordinary email account. Tips are read and may be researched; we will not publish your name or contact details without asking first, and you can ask us to delete your message at any time.
Your rights
Where the GDPR or similar law applies, you have rights of access, correction, deletion, and objection. Because this site holds almost nothing, most requests resolve to “we do not have any data about you”. Ask at the address above and we will tell you exactly what exists.
Changes
Material changes are dated at the top of this page. If analytics or a newsletter is switched on, this page is updated before it goes live, not after.