Privacy

AI Bacon is a blog. There are no accounts, no logins, and nothing to sign up for except the newsletter, which you opt into yourself. The only thing measured here is how many people read which posts.

What is collected

This site uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits. When analytics is active it records the pages you view, the site or search engine that referred you, an approximate location derived from your IP address (city level, not an address), and basic device information such as browser, operating system, and screen size.

Google Analytics also has a feature called Enhanced Measurement switched on, which records a handful of interactions automatically, without any of them being wired up by hand. On this site that means how far down a page you scroll, clicks on links leading to other sites, file downloads, engagement with embedded video, use of the on-site search, and interactions with the newsletter form. These are counted as anonymous events attached to the same identifier as your pageviews, not as a record of you personally.

It does not record your name, your email address, or anything you type into the page. Google Analytics is configured without advertising features, so this data is not used to build an advertising profile of you or to follow you to other sites.

Cookies

When analytics is active, Google Analytics stores two cookies on your device, both expiring two years after your last visit:

• _ga holds a randomly generated number used only to tell one browser apart from another, so that two visits from you are not counted as two different people.
• _ga_YWQJGQR962 keeps track of your current session, so that reading four posts in a row counts as one visit rather than four.

Neither contains your name, your email address, or anything you typed. Choosing Reject deletes both if they are already present and prevents new ones being set.

If you are visiting from the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, nothing is stored until you choose. Analytics storage is denied by default for those regions, and a banner asks before anything is written to your device. Choose Reject and no identifier is ever stored; visits are counted without one.

Whichever you choose, the choice itself is remembered in a small cookie named aib-consent holding only the word granted or denied. It is scoped to aibacon.net, so your answer applies across the whole site including the donation page, and it is what stops the banner asking you again on every page.

You can change your answer at any time, from anywhere on the site, using the Cookie settings control that appears in the footer whenever analytics is running. That reopens the same banner, and choosing Reject there withdraws consent and stops the identifier being used. Withdrawing is deliberately the same single click as giving it, and it is available whether or not you were shown the banner in the first place.

No advertising cookies are used anywhere on this site, in any region. Analytics runs with Google Signals and ad personalization explicitly switched off, so your visits are not fed into advertising audiences.

How long it is kept

Event-level analytics data is retained by Google for 14 months, the longest a standard Analytics property allows, after which Google deletes it automatically. Aggregate reports, meaning counts with no identifiers attached, are kept indefinitely.

Newsletter

If you subscribe, your email address is used to send the newsletter and nothing else. It is never sold, rented, or shared, and the list is self-hosted rather than handed to a third-party mailing service.

Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing stops all further email immediately and marks your address as unsubscribed; the record itself is kept, because that is what stops the system from mailing you again. If you would rather the address be erased outright, email [email protected] and it will be deleted.

Comments

Comments are handled by Comentario, a self-hosted comment system. If you post a comment, whatever you enter is stored so it can be displayed.

Other services

Pages load fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google receives the request for those font files. Some posts link to Amazon using affiliate links, which are marked as such where they appear. Following one of those links takes you to Amazon, where Amazon's own privacy policy applies.

How to opt out

• Use the Cookie settings control in the footer and choose Reject. This works everywhere, at any time, whether or not you ever saw the banner.
• Reject the analytics banner, if you are shown one.
• Install Google's Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, which blocks analytics on every site you visit.
• Use any content blocker, or a browser that blocks trackers by default. Nothing on this site breaks when analytics is blocked.

Your rights

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or a jurisdiction with comparable law, you can ask what data relates to you, ask for it to be deleted, or withdraw consent at any time.

Withdrawing consent is immediate and in your hands: the Cookie settings control in the footer, present whenever analytics is running, deletes the analytics cookies from your device and stops any identifier being stored or used again. To be exact about what that does and does not do, page views are still counted after you reject — but without a cookie, without an identifier, and with no way to connect this visit to any other. Nothing that could single you out is retained. If you would rather nothing at all were sent, any content blocker or Google's opt-out add-on below will stop the tag loading in the first place.

Deletion is a separate thing, and worth being precise about. Clearing the cookies stops future visits being linked together, but it does not reach back and remove the visits already recorded. Those sit on Google's servers under the pseudonymous identifier that was in the cookie at the time, and they age out on the 14-month retention schedule described above. If you want that history erased rather than merely expired, email [email protected] with the value of your _ga cookie, or with enough detail to identify the visits, and the request will be submitted through Google Analytics' own user-deletion process.

For anything else, including newsletter records, the same address works.

Changes

If what is collected here changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated.