Privacy Notice

This privacy notice describes how tombelfort.com, operated by Tom Belfort from New York and Lisbon, handles information about visitors. The site is a static research publication. It has no user accounts, no comment system, no newsletter, no advertising and no embedded third-party widgets. The notice is deliberately specific because a research site that writes about data systems ought to be able to account for its own.

What this site does not do

• No analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no pixel and no self-hosted analytics package. Readership is estimated from aggregate, non-identifying server log counts described below.
• No cookies. The site sets no cookies of its own. The interactive calculator on the front page runs entirely in your browser and does not store or transmit the values you enter.
• No tracking scripts. The only JavaScript served is the calculator script, hosted on this domain. It makes no network requests.
• No data sale or sharing for advertising. There is nothing to sell, and the site would not sell it if there were.

Web fonts

Headline, body and monospace typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts. When your browser requests those font files, Google receives the technical information any web request carries: your IP address, the user-agent string and the referring page. Google’s handling of that request is governed by its own privacy policy. If you prefer to avoid it, the site remains fully readable with the fonts blocked; it falls back to Georgia, Helvetica or Arial, and Courier New.11Self-hosting the fonts is on the lab’s maintenance list. Until then this is the single third-party request the site makes, and it is disclosed here for that reason.

Hosting and server logs

The site is served as static files from a content delivery network. The hosting provider records standard access logs for security and capacity purposes: the requested URL, the time of the request, the responding status code, the IP address, and the user-agent header. These logs are retained by the provider for a limited period, typically no more than thirty days, and are used by the lab only in aggregate, for example to count how many requests a monograph received in a month or to identify abusive crawlers. The lab does not attempt to identify individual visitors from log data and does not combine log data with any other source.

Editorial correspondence

If you write to editorial@tombelfort.com, your message, your email address and any information you include are received and stored in the lab’s mail system for as long as is needed to respond and to maintain a record of corrections and replication notes. Messages that result in a published correction are retained indefinitely as part of the editorial record; the correspondent is credited only with their consent and only to the degree they choose, which is why the front-page research log says “the reader in Porto” and nothing more. Advisory inquiries are handled under a separate written agreement before any client data is exchanged.

Legal bases and your rights

Where the General Data Protection Regulation or the UK GDPR applies, the lab processes server-log data on the basis of legitimate interest in operating a secure website, and processes correspondence on the basis of legitimate interest in responding to you and maintaining an accurate editorial record. Where the California Consumer Privacy Act or comparable United States state laws apply, the lab does not sell or share personal information and does not engage in profiling.

You have the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal data the lab holds about you, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, including the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados in Portugal. Because the lab holds so little, most requests can be answered in full within a few days. Send them to the editorial address above with enough detail for the lab to locate the data in question.

Children

The site is a technical publication intended for working professionals and researchers. It is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under sixteen.

Changes to this notice

This notice is revised when the site’s behaviour changes, for example if the fonts are moved to self-hosting or if a replication dataset is published for download. The revision date appears at the top of the page, and material changes are also noted in the front-page research log so that regular readers see them without having to re-read this document.

Questions about this notice should be directed to editorial@tombelfort.com.