Privacy Policy

The short version

letsgetbetterlife.com is a static site run by Let's Get Better Life. The pages are files served as they were written, with no accounts, no logins, no comment threads, and no newsletter. The site itself sets no cookies. Two cookieless counters, one from Cloudflare and one the publication runs itself, tally which essays are read and roughly where readers come from. Google Analytics measures the same things, and it uses two cookies of its own where they are allowed.

This site uses Google AdSense to display advertising. The advertising script is where nearly all of the data handling described below takes place; the only other outside code is that measurement. Apart from the visit records it produces, and apart from any email you decide to send, the publication keeps nothing about you.

What the publication does not collect

• Your name, email address, or other personal details, unless you write in and include them.
• Accounts, profiles, or a reading history connected to you.
• Heatmaps or session recordings. Visit records are anonymous and are read as totals per page.
• Data bought from, or sold to, anyone.

Advertising and cookies

This site uses Google AdSense to display advertising. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.

In practice, that means the ad you see beside an essay may reflect pages you have read elsewhere, and the same cookies help limit how often one ad repeats and record whether it was displayed. The cookies are set and read by Google and the vendors it works with. The publisher does not see them and receives no information about individual readers from them, only aggregate reporting on the ads themselves.

You can turn off personalized advertising from Google in its Ads Settings. Many other advertising vendors honor the opt-out at aboutads.info/choices, and readers in Europe can use youronlinechoices.eu. Opting out removes personalization. Ads still appear, but they are chosen from general factors such as the page you are reading rather than your browsing elsewhere.

Visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are shown a Google-certified consent message before advertising identifiers are used. Whatever you choose there can be changed later through the same message. The cookie policy sets out the categories of cookie involved and the browser controls available to you.

Email you send

Writing to contact@letsgetbetterlife.com puts your address and your message into an ordinary mailbox. The message is used to read and answer you. It is not added to any list, used for marketing, or passed on, apart from the email provider that carries and stores mail as a matter of course.

A thread is kept while it is still useful, which mostly means while a correction you reported is being checked. You can ask for your correspondence to be deleted at any point, and it will be.

How the pages are delivered

The site is served through Cloudflare. Delivering a page, and keeping the site available under automated traffic, means Cloudflare processes each request and may log the technical details that come with it: the IP address making the request, the browser's user agent string, the address requested, and the time. Nearly every website you visit works this way.

Cloudflare handles that processing under its own privacy policy. The publisher does not use those logs to identify readers or to build audience profiles, and does not combine them with anything else.

The pages also carry Cloudflare Web Analytics, loaded from static.cloudflareinsights.com, which is how the publication knows which essays people read. For each page view it reports the address, the referring page, the type of browser, the country, and load timings, and the publisher sees these only added up. It sets no cookie, keeps nothing in the browser, and is not used to recognize a reader from one visit to the next (Cloudflare's description).

Visits are also counted by Umami, open-source analytics software the publication runs on its own server and loads from analytics.youness-ops.com. It notes the page, the referring page, the browser, operating system, device, screen size and language, and an approximate location taken from the IP address, which it does not keep. It sets no cookie and stores nothing in the browser, and the publisher reads these figures added up.

Google Analytics

The publication uses Google Analytics 4 to learn how its essays are found and read. For each visit it reports the pages viewed, the referring page, whether a page was read to the end, clicks on outside links, the browser, device, operating system, screen size and language, and a rough location that Google derives from the IP address. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses, and the publication gives Google no name, email address or other direct identifier.

Google signals and ads personalization are switched off for this data, which keeps it apart from the advertising described above. Google processes it on the publication's behalf under its data processing terms and holds visit-level data for 14 months. The publisher reads the results added up, never one reader at a time.

It uses two cookies, _ga and _ga_BGYXF1MBXZ, which can last 2 years and carry a random identifier for recognizing a returning browser. They are not used for readers in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, Brazil or Quebec, and elsewhere they stay on until you switch them off here. Without them the tag still sends cookieless signals, such as a page having been viewed, which Google uses only for aggregated figures.

Turn off Google Analytics cookies

The button leaves one small cookie, ga_optout, so this browser remembers the choice. The Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on stops it on every website.

Links to other sites

Essays sometimes link to studies, public agencies, or further reading. Those sites follow their own privacy practices, and this policy covers letsgetbetterlife.com alone.

Children

The site is written for adults and is not directed at children under 13. No personal information is knowingly collected from children. If you believe a child has written to the contact address, say so and the message will be deleted.

Your data, on request

Requests go to contact@letsgetbetterlife.com. Since the only personal data the publisher holds is email you began, a request usually means asking what is held, asking for a copy, asking for a correction, or asking for deletion. Each of those is handled, though a reply may first ask a question to confirm which correspondence is meant. Data held by Google in connection with advertising or analytics is managed through Google's own tools, including the Ads Settings page linked above.

Depending on where you live, local law may give you further rights over personal data. This page does not claim certification under any particular privacy framework. It describes what the site does.

Changes to this policy

The policy is revised in place, and the date at the top changes with it. Earlier versions are not archived separately.