What this notice covers
This notice describes how this website actually behaves today. It is reviewed whenever the site's data handling changes.
Eightception is operated by Igor Levi. Questions about personal data can be sent to i@eightception.com.
Newsletter subscriptions
If you subscribe, the email address you provide is sent through Eightception’s own protected gateway to the Ghost members system. Ghost and the configured email provider use it to send confirmation and, after confirmation, publications you requested.
One consequence worth stating here rather than leaving it buried below: once you confirm, and only if statistics are on, your visits to this site are linked to that address. The detail is in “Analytics and measurement”, and it is reversible from the cookie settings at any time.
You can unsubscribe using the link in any newsletter email. Do not submit another person’s address without permission.
The conversation at /start
The conversation runs in your browser. Every answer you tap is held in that browser tab alone and is gone when you close it. Nothing about the conversation reaches this website unless you fill in the request at the end and press the send button. There is no assistant behind it: every question, and every reply to it, was written in advance.
If you do send, this is what leaves your browser: the email address you gave, the site or profile address if you gave one, whatever you wrote in your own words, and the fixed options you tapped along the way. It goes to Eightception’s own server, which forwards it to Igor as a plain-text email through Resend, the provider that carries this site’s transactional mail. He reads it himself. The reply address on that email is yours, so his answer comes back to you.
To keep the form from being abused, the server counts recent submissions. It holds your IP address for ten minutes and your email address for twenty-four hours, in memory only and purely as counters; both are lost whenever the server restarts, and neither is used for anything else. Accepting a request also writes a single line to the server’s operational log – the outcome, the situation the conversation landed on, and the IP address. What you wrote is never in that line.
Two limits worth stating plainly. Nothing you write here is added to the newsletter list – subscribing is a separate question, asked once, after the request, and never assumed. And nothing you write is recorded in analytics: the measurement described below sees which fixed options were chosen, never your words. If you are a confirmed subscriber, this conversation is not attached to your subscriber record.
Technical data
The hosting and delivery infrastructure may create ordinary security and access logs such as IP address, request time, requested path and browser information. These logs are used to operate and protect the service.
Analytics and measurement
Three tools may run here, under two different permissions, and they behave differently. You choose from the banner on your first visit and can change your choice at any time from the cookie settings below.
PostHog, running in its European region so the data stays in the EU, is what counts visits. Before you have chosen, and if you refuse, it runs without cookies. The only thing that REMAINS on your device in that state is a flag holding the value “off”, which is what keeps tracking suppressed – it holds no identifier and says nothing about you. (The analytics library also writes and immediately deletes a throwaway key to test whether storage is available at all.) The visit itself is counted using a temporary value derived on the server from your IP address and browser, salted with a secret that changes every day and is discarded with it. That value cannot be linked to you, to your visit yesterday, or to any other website. If you turn on statistics, PostHog is allowed to keep an identifier in your browser's local storage so that a returning reader is recognised as the same reader. Session recording – the replay of a real visitor's screen – is switched off entirely. PostHog data is kept for at most twelve months. Its requests are served through this website's own domain rather than PostHog's, which is a technical measure against ad blockers, not a way of hiding the recipient.
Alongside page views, a small set of named events is recorded: starting the conversation at /start/, each answer chosen in it, the recommendation it reaches, an action taken from that recommendation, and the result of a sent request – plus asking for the newsletter, and clicking one of the few remaining links that open your mail client. Every one of these carries fixed values only: which page, which option, which outcome. What you typed is never part of any of them, and it is never sent to an analytics provider in any form.
If you are a confirmed newsletter subscriber and statistics are on, your visits here are linked to you by your email address – with one deliberate exception: the events from the conversation at /start/ are never attached to you, even then, and are always recorded as anonymous. Both conditions are required. You must have clicked the confirmation link in the email, because until then nobody has proven the address is yours – signing up alone is not enough. And statistics must be on, because the anonymous count has nowhere to put an identity. What it changes: your reading appears under your address instead of as an anonymous visit, which is how Igor sees whether the writing is useful to the people who actually asked for it. It does not follow you to other websites. It stops the moment you turn statistics off – the stored identifier is deleted and counting returns to the anonymous form – and unsubscribing ends it for future visits. You can ask for the record to be deleted at i@eightception.com.
Google Analytics 4 loads only if you turn on statistics, and never before. It is the same property the previous Eightception website used, so that the site's history survives the move. If you refuse, it is not loaded at all.
The LinkedIn Insight Tag loads only if you turn on marketing, and never on statistics alone. LinkedIn uses it to tell Igor, in aggregate only, what kinds of people visit – job titles, company sizes, industries – and it shows nothing at all until at least 300 LinkedIn members have visited, which is LinkedIn's own privacy threshold. It also lets LinkedIn recognise visitors for advertising purposes. LinkedIn is an independent controller of what it collects; its own privacy policy governs that data.
Withdrawing consent takes effect immediately: PostHog drops back to the cookieless count and its stored identifier is deleted, Google's cookies for this site are expired, and the LinkedIn tag is not loaded again. One honest limitation – a LinkedIn tag that has already run in the page you are looking at cannot be removed by this website until you reload, and cookies LinkedIn holds on its own domain can only be cleared through your browser or through LinkedIn.
External services and links
Articles may load media from Ghost or legacy Eightception media locations. Links to LinkedIn, YouTube and other external services take you to those providers, whose own privacy terms apply.