Privacy Policy & GDPR

So I guess it is a good idea to have a privacy policy if you are running an email list like this. Mine is very simple: total privacy.

Unfortunately the technical realities of the internet mean that objective is more or less impossible to achieve.

I'm using a third-party marketing email provider called Brevo. If you sign up for emails, then they will add you to a circulation list and when it's time for me to send an email I log into Brevo and send it from there. I can access the individual email addresses but my intention is not to. Brevo processes subscriber data on my behalf in accordance with its privacy and security policies. But if you reply that comes straight to me, not them.

Brevo are a pretty big marketing company, which hopefully will help avoid too many of the emails going into your spam folder, but it would be worth checking after you sign up. It also means their servers should be reasonably secure, but at the same time because they're a big repository of email addresses they are also a juicy target

I won't be offended - I won't even know - if you use a disposable email address or alias. If you don't know what that is, then I would suggest you find out and start using them to manage the number of copies of your real email address that are out in the world. There are lots of services, iCloud makes it very easy or you could try Duck Duck Go email protection, Firefox Relay or addy.io and I think the Swiss privacy company Proton (which I use for some things) offers a handful of email redirects on their free tier.

GDPR

Having the list makes me a data controller under the GDPR. Brevo is a French company, and may process your data outside the UK where appropriate safeguards are in place. I am Martyn Hanmore and you can contact me via any of the channels on this site about any data or privacy concerns.

The data collected comprises the email address you enter via the Brevo portal together with whatever logs, subscription dates, etc they keep. The lawful basis for collecting it is your consent by subscribing. You can unsubscribe or ask that your data is deleted or corrected at any time, but otherwise the data will be retained indefinitely until you do. You are entitled to request information about the data that is held and processed and to ask that it be corrected or deleted if you wish, and there are complaints mechanisms to the Data Protection authority relevant in your jurisdiction. You also have the right to withdraw your consent at any time (unsubscribing is exactly that).

The data will be used exclusively for the opt-in newsletter circulation of posts on this site. On a personal level that means if you change email addresses then signing up with the new one doesn't tell me that it has changed, so you should send me an email direct!

This website is built by Cloudflare pages and uses a small number of third-party services to deliver pages and embedded content. Those providers may receive technical information such as your IP address when you visit the site.

AI

AI has been instrumental in building the technical machinery that runs this site. However (and because I don't know anything about GDPR) this is the only page on which it has also had a substantive input into the page content.

18 July 2026