What this site stores, and how to say no.
Short version: nothing about you is collected until you press Accept on the small box at the bottom of the page. If you press Decline, or nothing at all, the site is just text.
If you accept
Two services start, both only after your yes:
- Google Analytics 4 counts what gets read: which page, for how long, from which country, on what kind of device, and the small events the essays emit (a copied prompt, a jump to a section, a download). It sets cookies named
_gaand_ga_7MWGXF1ELCholding a random identifier, so two visits from the same browser count as one reader. Reports keep this for fourteen months. Provider: Google Ireland Ltd. - Microsoft Clarity records how a page is read: scrolling, clicks, where the cursor lingers, as an anonymised replay and heatmaps. Text you type is masked. It sets cookies named
_clckand_clsk. Recordings are kept for thirty days, after which Clarity keeps a small sample (one percent of sessions, or ten a day, whichever is more) for up to nine months; sessions someone labels are also kept nine months (Microsoft's own data-retention documentation). Provider: Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd.
No advertising pixels, no cross-site tracking, nothing sold. The point of both is one question: does anyone read this, and where does it stop working.
If you decline
Neither service loads, on this or any later page. Your choice is remembered in your own browser for 180 days, then the box asks once more. You can change your mind any time through Privacy choices at the bottom of every page. Choosing Decline there stops the collection immediately: consent is revoked and the page reloads without the two services.
If you subscribe by email
The essays are sent by beehiiv (beehiiv, Inc., United States). When you type your address into the field on this site and press Subscribe, the site's own server passes it to beehiiv; nothing from beehiiv loads in your browser for that. Only if that route fails does the page offer beehiiv's own form instead, and then a small script from beehiiv builds that form on the page. If you arrived through a link with tracking parameters or from another website, that script remembers where you came from in a first-party cookie named bhv_attribution for thirty days; on a plain visit it sets nothing. The form itself, which runs on beehiiv's own domain, uses beehiiv's bot-protection cookies (Cloudflare and PerimeterX) on that domain, not on this one.
When you subscribe, beehiiv stores your email address, the time, and the page you subscribed from. You confirm the address once from your inbox (double opt-in); an unconfirmed address is not written to and is removed. Like every newsletter service, beehiiv notes whether an email was opened and which links were clicked. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe, which removes you from the list; to have the address deleted entirely, write to the address below. beehiiv is a company in the United States, so the address is stored there.
What happens without any choice
The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps ordinary server logs (the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time) for its own operation and security. That is the same for every website and needs no cookie.
Your rights, and whom to ask
You can ask what is stored about you, have it corrected or deleted, and withdraw consent at any time. Write to vincent@vincenttresno.com. The site is run from Zurich, Switzerland, by Vincent Tresno, and follows the Swiss Data Protection Act; readers in the EU have their rights under the GDPR as well.
Last changed: 2026-09-28 (the email subscription section added).