Privacy
Field Guides has no accounts, no forms, no ads and no cookies. This page says exactly what does happen when you read it, and who else is involved in getting the pages to you.
The short version
- I don't ask for, collect or store any personal information. There is nothing to sign up for.
- The site sets no cookies. A few reading preferences are kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere.
- Visits are counted with a privacy-first, cookieless analytics tool. It does not identify you or follow you to other sites.
- Nothing is sold or shared for advertising, because there is nothing to sell.
What stays in your browser
To remember your choices between visits, the site writes a handful of values to your browser's localStorage, all prefixed fg: — light or dark theme, drill-mode settings, and which checklist items and practice questions you have ticked off. They live only on your device, are never transmitted to me or anyone else, and disappear if you clear site data in your browser. Because they are strictly functional and never leave your machine, there is no cookie banner.
Analytics
On christopherm.xyz I use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see which guides are read and whether pages load quickly. It uses no cookies and no localStorage, does not fingerprint your browser or track you across sites, and gives me aggregate figures only: page views, referrers, country, browser and device type, and load-time measurements. I cannot see who you are and I do not try to.
Who else sees a request
Serving any web page means your browser sends your IP address and some technical headers to the machines that deliver it. For this site those are:
| Provider | Role | Their policy |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosts christopherm.xyz, runs the analytics above, and filters abusive bot traffic. As with any host, it processes IP addresses and request logs for delivery and security. | Privacy policy |
| GitHub Pages | Hosts the mirror at chrisgmartin.github.io and logs visitor IP addresses for security. No analytics run there. | Privacy statement |
| jsDelivr | Pages that contain code load the open-source highlight.js library from the jsDelivr CDN, so your browser makes a request to it. The file is integrity-pinned, so it cannot be altered in transit. | Privacy policy |
Fonts, styles and every other script are served from this site itself. There are no advertising networks, social widgets or embedded trackers.
Links to other sites
Guides link out to documentation, papers, source repositories and, from the support card, to Ko-fi. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site under their privacy policy; if you choose to support this work, the payment provider — not me — handles your payment details. The site sends only its origin (not the page you were on) as the referrer to other sites.
Your choices and rights
You can clear the stored preferences at any time through your browser's site-data settings, and the site works with them cleared or blocked. Content blockers that stop the analytics script do not affect anything else. Because I hold no personal data about readers, there is nothing for me to look up, correct or delete — but if you are in a jurisdiction that gives you rights over personal data (such as the GDPR or CCPA) and you have a question or concern, raise it and I will answer.
Contact and changes
Questions about this page: open an issue on the site's GitHub repository. If what the site does changes — a new tool, a new provider — this page changes first, and the date at the top with it. See also the terms of use.