Privacy

Thrive Culture Media is an independent publication. We sell nothing, we run no advertising, and we have no interest in building a profile of you. This page describes every system that touches your data, in plain terms.

We do not use tracking cookies

Reading this site sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser storage. We measure traffic with PostHog, configured to keep its state in memory only, which means the measurement ends when you close the tab. We cannot tell a returning reader from a new one, and we accepted that trade deliberately so that this site does not need a consent banner.

What that measurement records is the page viewed, the referring page, and coarse device and country information derived from the request. It is not linked to a name, an account, or an identifier that persists between visits.

What we store, and only when you ask us to

Newsletter. If you subscribe, we store your email address, the date you subscribed, which part of the site you subscribed from, and any topic interests you picked. That is the whole record. We use it to send the newsletter and nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it with anyone outside the services listed below.

Messages. If you email us or use the contact form, we keep what you sent for as long as it takes to deal with it.

Studio accounts. Contributors have accounts holding a name, an email, and a hashed password. Readers never need one.

Companies that process data on our behalf

• Vercel hosts the site. Their server logs include IP addresses, which is unavoidable for anything on the web, and are retained on their schedule rather than ours.
• PostHog receives the anonymous traffic measurement described above.
• Sentry receives error reports when something breaks. These can include the page you were on and technical details of the failure.
• Resend delivers the newsletter and any reply to your message, so it handles your email address.
• Our database and media hosts store published content, subscriber records, and images.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and using it is the fastest route to removal. For anything else, write to us and we will act on it. If you are in the UK or the EU, the GDPR gives you these rights explicitly and you may complain to your national data protection authority if we handle a request badly.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Because these pages live in the same repository as the site itself, every revision has a commit behind it showing what changed and when.