3 min reading time

Privacy

Privacy

This site collects the bare minimum needed to know which sections are read and which searches are useful — no more.

What is collected

  • Aggregate pageviews via GoatCounter, loaded as a small cookieless script on every HTML page. No cookies are set, no IP address is stored, no third-party trackers are loaded, and no cross-site identifiers exist.

  • In-book search queries — what you type into the sidebar search box — are sent the same way. Queries are debounced, queries longer than 80 characters are dropped, and anything that looks like an email address is dropped client-side before sending.

  • Server access logs, processed locally with GoAccess. IPs are anonymised in the published reports, and the per-page counts are daily unique-IP totals from which the IPs are discarded after aggregation. The raw logs themselves are rotated by the webserver and retained for up to 5 years, so that the readership history survives; they are never published, and nothing derived from them identifies a reader.

The resulting aggregates (top pages, the 60-day per-page sparklines you see in the sidebar, search queries, and an overview report) are public at learnche.org/_stats/, in keeping with the open spirit of this CC BY-SA 4.0 book. The same numbers are also surfaced inside the book itself on the Readership statistics page, and as the 60-day reader count next to the sparkline in the sidebar of every page. Every figure covers complete days only, so the most recent day shown is yesterday.

Kept in your browser

One preference is stored in your browser’s localStorage, under the key pid:code-blocks:v1. It records whether you asked for the code blocks on a page to be shown or hidden, so that the choice carries to the next page you read. The value is the single word expanded or collapsed, it is never sent anywhere, and clearing your browser’s site data removes it. Nothing else is stored on your device: no cookies, and no other keys.

Opt out

The pixel honours your browser’s Do Not Track setting: enable DNT and no event of any kind is sent. Self-hosted copies of this book do not phone home — the script short-circuits on localhost, 127.0.0.1, and file:// URLs.

Questions or concerns: please open an issue at kgdunn/pid-book#issues.

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