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. Two things measure: Google Analytics, which counts which pages get read, and Pinterest’s tag, which tells us whether you arrived from one of our posts there. Both are separate choices and both can be declined. The only personal data we ever hold ourselves 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.

Analytics arrives through Google Tag Manager, a container that decides which measurement scripts a page loads. Tag Manager sets no cookies of its own and measures nothing by itself; the cookies above come from Analytics, which the container loads. The container also holds the Pinterest tag described in the next section, and nothing else.

Being a container, what it loads is configured outside this site’s source code, so that one fact cannot be checked against the code the way the rest of this page can. We treat anything added there that collects more than page reads as a material change: it appears here first, and the consent choice below governs it whether or not this page has caught up, because the denied-by-default state is applied to the container itself rather than to any individual tag.

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.

The Analytics cookies above are for measurement only, and nothing in them is shared with an ad network. Pinterest is the one exception on this site and it has its own section, because it would be misleading to describe it as analytics.

We post code pages to Pinterest, and the site carries Pinterest’s tag so we can tell whether a visit here began with one of those posts. It is a tag belonging to an advertising company, and pretending otherwise by filing it under analytics would be the kind of thing this page exists not to do.

It loads only if you allow it, and it is a separate choice from analytics — accepting one does not accept the other. In the EEA and the UK it stays off until you say otherwise. It sets _pin_unauth, which groups what one unidentified visitor did here under a random id, and, if you arrived by clicking a Pinterest ad, _epik, which links that click to the visit. Pinterest states a one-year lifetime for both. Turning the category off in Cookie settings deletes them.

Pinterest is an independent controller of what it collects through its own tag, not our processor, and what it does with that data is governed by Pinterest’s privacy policy. We have not configured enhanced match, customer list upload or any audience built from this site.

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.

Analytics and Pinterest are asked separately, and accepting one never grants the other. You can change your mind at any time from Cookie settings in the footer of every page. Turning a category back off there also deletes the cookies it allowed — the _ga pair, or the Pinterest ones — 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. No banner, no sponsored code, no paid placement in a list of causes. The Pinterest tag described above is the one ad-network script here and it measures our own posts; it does not put advertising in front of you.
• 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.