Privacy

Faultsheet is run by Dmitry Kulchitsky, an individual rather than a company — the data controller for everything described on this page, and the person any request under this policy reaches.

Write to contact@faultsheet.com. A postal address is available on request; it is a home address, so it is not published here.

There are no accounts, no sign-ups and no forms on this site. Nothing you do here is tied to a name or an email address. The only thing collected is anonymous measurement of which pages get read, through Google Analytics, and the only personal data we ever hold is an email you choose to send us.

The site loads Google Analytics 4, and only on the live site — a development server reports nothing. In the EEA and the UK it loads only after you allow it, which is the section below. It sets first-party cookies named _ga and _ga_<property>, which distinguish one visit from another so that a page read twice by the same person is not counted as two people. The _ga cookie lasts up to two years by Google’s default.

Google acts as our data processor for this. Google states that Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses; it uses them in transit to derive an approximate location, no finer than a city. Retention of the collected event data is governed by the setting on our Analytics property and by Google’s data retention rules.

These cookies are for measurement only. They are not used for advertising, they are not shared with ad networks, and there is no remarketing, audience export or cross-site tracking configured.

If you are in the EEA or the UK, nothing is measured until you accept. The tag starts in a denied state for those regions before any script of ours runs — Google’s own tag resolves that from your address, so it holds even if the banner never appears. Accepting is what turns measurement on; there is no default-on state to catch you out.

The banner gives Reject the same weight as Accept, in the same place, with no pre-ticked boxes and no second visit needed to be left alone. It is not a wall: the page behind it stays readable, because you probably came here standing at a broken machine.

You can change your mind at any time from Cookie settings in the footer of every page. Turning analytics back off there also deletes the _ga cookies that consent allowed, rather than merely stopping the next measurement.

Two cookies exist to run that choice, and neither is optional because neither would work if it were: fs_consent stores what you chose, and fs_consent_region stores which region the site placed you in, so it knows whether to ask at all. It holds a two-letter bucket — EEA or not — for twelve hours, and identifies nobody.

Outside those regions measurement starts on arrival and no banner is shown. That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, and the opt-outs below work everywhere, immediately, without asking us.

• Block or delete cookies for this site in your browser. Nothing on the site depends on them — every page reads normally with cookies and JavaScript both switched off.
• Install Google’s Analytics opt-out browser add-on, which stops measurement on every site that uses it, not just this one.
• Use your browser’s tracking protection or a blocker. We do not attempt to detect or work around either.

The site is served by Vercel, which handles requests on our behalf and keeps operational logs of them — including IP addresses — for security and reliability. That is a normal consequence of the site being on the internet at all; we do not read those logs to build any picture of individual readers, and nothing in them is combined with the analytics data.

The addresses on this site are ordinary mailboxes, not a ticketing system. If you write to us we hold your message and your address for as long as it takes to deal with it, and keep corrections correspondence longer where it is the evidence behind a change to a page.

• corrections@faultsheet.com — a code is wrong or out of date
• contact@faultsheet.com — privacy requests and anything else

• We do not sell or rent personal data, and there is none to sell.
• We show no advertising and run no ad-network scripts.
• We build no profiles of readers and attempt no identification of them.
• There are currently no affiliate or commercial links anywhere on this site. If that changes, this page changes first, and the links will be marked as such on the page they appear on.

If you are in the EU or UK, the GDPR gives you the right to ask what data relates to you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to it being processed, and to complain to your data protection authority. Residents of California and other US states with comparable laws have equivalent rights, including the right not to have personal information sold — which we do not do.

The honest practical answer is that we hold almost nothing to give you. Analytics data reaches us already aggregated and carries no identifier we could match to a person, so a request about it is best made to Google or answered by the opt-outs above. Anything you sent us by email we can find and delete on request — write to contact@faultsheet.com.

This site is a technical reference for appliance owners and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from them, and there is no mechanism here that could — no account, no form, no upload.

The date below changes when this text does, not on every deployment. Material changes — a new processor, a new category of data, the arrival of commercial links — will be reflected here before they take effect on the site.