I admit it: I'm a security and privacy zealot. Strength Through Paranoia, as Admiral Parangosky would say, and I taught her all she knows. She was a trusting soul before she met me.
So I try to practice what I preach.
My mailing list is solely for the purpose of sending you information and asking for your views. It'll never be shared with third parties or used for any other purpose. All you're consenting to is receiving e-mails: not direct mail, targeted advertising, or anything else. And you really do have to deliberately opt in to get on it. MailerLite does the automation, so it has a file of e-mail addresses to send the newsletters to. BookFunnel sends out the e-books and stories for me, because they're good at that and it beats waiting weeks for me to mail you a file that might not open on your device, so they use an address database too.
I only collect your e-mail address, name, and country from the sign-up form. I need to know which country you're in because that affects what I have to do by law in terms of data handling. I need your name so that I can identify your subscription in the event of someone with a similar name asking to be unsubscribed manually. I don't need your street address, age, gender, or any other detail, because while this data is vital in marketing and advertising, and would probably boost my sales because I'd be able to target content more carefully, I'll live without it.
You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time by clicking on the Unsubscribe link in the message. If you unsubscribe but you still get messages from me, it means that something has gone wrong at a technical level, so e-mail me via
Contact Me or reply to the message itself, and I'll remove you from the list personally. If you don't know why you got a newsletter from me, cast your mind back to either signing up for it on this site some time ago, or revisit the year 2018, when you clicked on a joint author promotion giveaway run by SF Bridge in exchange for your e-mail address. Those are the only two routes by which you'd end up on my list. (And I don't do joint promotions any more.)
E-mails you send me via the contact form will not be used for marketing purposes either. I don't harvest contact details from them. If you wanted to be on my mailing list, you'd sign up. I file messages received via the
Contact Me page purely so I can check whether I've responded to you before, otherwise I might repeat myself and bore you senseless, or give you conflicting information the next time because I forget stuff, which is probably worse. Those messages are securely stored on my own system, which is not accessible by anyone else.
(E-mail isn't secure in transit unless you encrypt it, of course, which is why I try to get everyone to switch to ProtonMail or another encrypted service.)
I don't do cloud (for quite a few practical reasons) and
I don't use cookies on this site. The upside is that I don't know where you are, what device you're using, or where you browse next. The downside is that the web site doesn't know who you are either, so you'll see the sign-up pop-up on the home page every time you visit, even if you've already subscribed to my newsletter. I decided it was the lesser of two evils. I might need to revisit that and add a cookie to the home page if it proves to be a pain for site visitors, but for the time being, it's all cookie-free. And Google-free, of course.