Privacy

Last updated: 1 September 2026

This is a personal blog run by Brendan St. John. There are no accounts, no logins, no comment form, and no advertising. The site sets no cookies of its own, and no first-party data about you is stored on it.

Analytics

A self-hosted Plausible instance at plausible.bstjohn.net counts page views. It is cookie-free and does not track you across sites or build a profile of you. It records the page URL, referrer, and coarse browser/OS/device and country information derived from your IP address; the IP address itself is not stored. See Plausible's data policy.

Email subscription

The newsletter is run by Buttondown. The signup card on /subscribe/ and at the foot of each post is click-gated: nothing is requested from Buttondown until you click "Show the signup form". Once opened, the embedded page is Buttondown's, and it (and the Cloudflare Turnstile anti-spam challenge inside it) may set its own cookies. If you subscribe, your email address is stored by Buttondown, not by this site; every email carries an unsubscribe link. Newsletter emails are sent from blog@bstjohn.net and their links are rewritten through track.bstjohn.net, a host operated by Buttondown, so Buttondown can count clicks; the hostname is on this domain but the service behind it is theirs. See Buttondown's privacy policy and Cloudflare's.

Comments and webmentions

There is no comment form here. Comments under a post are public replies to a Bluesky post, fetched by your browser from Bluesky's public API (public.api.bsky.app) when the comments section scrolls into view; avatars come from cdn.bsky.app. Webmentions are fetched the same way from webmention.io, and reply avatars may load from whichever image host the mentioning site uses. Those requests come from your browser, so those services see your IP address and user agent. The site sends Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, so they are not told which page you were reading. See Bluesky's privacy policy.

Diagrams

Posts containing Mermaid diagrams load the Mermaid library from the jsDelivr CDN, pinned with a Subresource Integrity hash. No other third-party scripts are used.

Your browser's storage

The light/dark theme selector saves one value under the key theme in your browser's local storage. It never leaves your device and is not a cookie. Clearing site data removes it.

Hosting

The site is static files served from Amazon S3 in AWS's us-east-1 region. As the host, AWS processes ordinary request metadata; see AWS's privacy notice.

Your choices

  • Block plausible.bstjohn.net in your ad blocker or your browser's tracking protection, and the analytics script will not report anything. Plausible does not act on the browser's Do Not Track signal, so blocking the script is the way to opt out.
  • Don't click the signup card and Buttondown is never contacted.
  • Unsubscribe from any newsletter email to have Buttondown remove your address.

Changes

Material changes will be reflected on this page with a new "last updated" date.