Privacy Policy

We collect as little as we can. We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, we do not run advertising trackers, and we do not build profiles of readers. You can read every essay without an account or giving us an email.

If you sign up for the Weekly Letter, we store your email address, the date you signed up, and where on the site you signed up. We pass the address to Buttondown, the email service that sends the letter, and you confirm it before letters arrive.

Buttondown reports whether an email was delivered and opened. We see those numbers as totals per email, which helps us judge whether the letter is useful. Some email apps block this counting.

Every letter has an unsubscribe link. When you unsubscribe, we mark your address as removed and stop sending. You can ask us to delete it entirely.

Some links pass through our site before opening their destination: Freedom Note links in the weekly email, and product links on the Products page and in Advertisement sections. For each click we record only which link it was, the page or week it came from, and the time.

We do not record your name, email, account, IP address or device with the click. These counts show which links get used. They are not sales figures, and we do not receive order data from the stores.

Product links add standard labels (UTM tags) to the store address so the store can see a visit came from this site. Once you are on a store's site, that store's own privacy policy applies.

To comment, you create a reader account with email and password or Google sign-in. We use your account only to sign you in, limit posting frequency and moderate comments.

Comments show only the display name you choose and your text, and appear after an editor approves them. Your email and account ID are never shown publicly.

We use only what the site needs to work, such as keeping you signed in. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Only the site's editor, through a private desk, and the services that run the site: our hosting and database provider, and Buttondown for email. They handle data on our behalf, not for their own marketing.

You can unsubscribe at any time. You can also ask us to delete your comments or account, or tell you what we hold about you and correct or delete it. Write to support@altaridge-media.com.

The site is open to students, but accounts and newsletter signups are meant for readers 13 and older.

If our practices change, we will update this page and its date. For paid and advertising links, see the disclosure page.