Protecting Reader Data: Our Privacy Practices

Introduction

Last updated: February 2025

This is the website of Kathleen Eagle, where readers come to browse her books, follow new releases, and occasionally drop a line. The site is small, and so is the amount of data it asks of you. Most visitors read a page and leave no trace beyond a routine server log.

This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it. We've written it in plain language on purpose. Legal documents tend to bury the one sentence a reader actually wants, so we've tried to surface those sentences instead of hiding them.

The short version: the only personal details we hold are the ones you hand us on purpose, like an email address for the newsletter. We share them with no one unless a court of law requires it.

Purposes of Processing

Every piece of data we touch serves one of a few modest goals. We keep the site running, watch for pages that load slowly or break, and answer the people who write to us.

Keeping the site healthy

Standard server logs help us spot errors and security problems. If a book page suddenly returns a blank screen, those records are usually how we find out before anyone emails to complain.

Understanding what works

Aggregate analytics tell us which titles readers linger on and which posts go ignored. This shapes what gets written next. We look at patterns, not people.

Answering you

When you use the Contact form or subscribe to the newsletter, we use what you provide to reply or to send the emails you asked for. Nothing more.

External Services

A website is never built from a single piece. A handful of outside providers help deliver these pages, and each one sees a sliver of technical information in the process.

Our hosting and content-delivery providers handle the actual serving of files. They receive the basic request data any web server needs: the page you asked for, your IP address, the time. Analytics tooling, where active, measures visit patterns and performance.

We may add advertising networks in the future. If and when that happens, this policy will be updated before any ad-related tracking begins, and the cookies section below will reflect it.

Information Collected

Here's the full inventory, grouped by how it reaches us.

Notice the pattern. Two of these three categories exist only because you chose to fill in a field. We never pre-check a subscription box or sign you up as a side effect of buying or browsing.

Cookies and Tracking

Cookies are small files a site stores in your browser. We use them sparingly, and they fall into three buckets.

Strictly necessary

These remember your consent choices and keep a session intact while you move between pages. The site can't function properly without them, so they aren't optional.

Analytics

These help us measure visit patterns and page performance in aggregate. They tell us a post was read in the ballpark of five hundred times; they don't tell us who you are.

Advertising

Reserved for future use. Should we introduce ad personalization, advertising cookies would support it, and we'll ask for your consent first rather than assume it.

You hold the final say. Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies through its settings, and you can clear ours at any time. Some site features may behave oddly afterward, which is the trade-off for tighter control.

Data Subject Rights

The information is yours, and you can act on it. Concretely, that means you may:

• Ask what personal data we hold about you and request a copy.
• Ask us to delete it.
• Opt out of analytics tracking, through your browser or by unsubscribing from emails.

To exercise any of these, reach us through the Contact page. We'd rather hear from you directly than route requests through a faceless form, and a real reply is what you'll get.

Storage and Deletion

We keep data only as long as it earns its place. Technical logs rotate out on a routine schedule. Contact messages stay while a conversation is live and for a reasonable window afterward, in case you write back. Newsletter addresses remain until you unsubscribe, at which point they leave our active list.

When you ask us to remove your information, we honor it. Some records may persist briefly in routine backups before those cycles overwrite them, but they're not used for anything in the meantime. This is a small publishing site, not a data operation, and our retention reflects that.

Policy Updates

Practices change. New tools get adopted, old ones retired, and the law evolves. When we revise this policy in a way that affects you, we'll update the date at the top and, for significant changes, note them clearly on the page.

If anything here is unclear, ask. Reading the Terms of Use alongside this page gives you the fuller picture of how the site works.