PRIVACY WHAT THIS SITE COUNTS
PRIVACY
This site counts page views so I can tell whether anyone reads what I build. The counting runs on a machine I own, in Nashville. There is no analytics company involved, no advertising network, and nothing stored on your device.
Nothing is written to your browser
No cookies. No local storage. No session storage. No identifier of any kind is created, read, or saved on your device by the counter.
What a page view records
Four things, and only these four:
- Which page, chosen from a fixed list of six.
- Which site the link came from, reduced to one of about a dozen categories such as search, github, or direct. The full address you came from never leaves your browser.
- The date, in local Nashville time.
- The hour of day. The hour is stored separately from the page, so the two cannot be put back together.
A second, optional record
When you leave a page, the browser may send roughly how long the page was visible and roughly how far down you scrolled, both in coarse bands. It is stored by date and page only, with no hour and no referrer attached.
Your address and your browser string are never stored
Your IP address is cut down to a network block of 256 addresses, mixed with a random secret that exists only in the running program's memory, and turned into a short number. That number is used for one purpose: to say "this looks like the same visitor today". The secret is replaced every day and is never written to a file, a database, or a log. The browser string is read once to spot crawlers and is then discarded.
Daily numbers are deleted daily
At the end of each local day, those short numbers are deleted and replaced by a single count of how many there were. What remains is a set of totals. Nothing that points at a person survives the day, which is also why a request to delete your data cannot be answered: there is nothing left keyed to you to find.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are honored
If either signal is on, your browser sends nothing, and the server discards anything that arrives anyway. Both checks exist because some browsers hide one of the two.
How to block it
The counting hostname is pulse.ilovemcars.com. It is named here so you can block it. Blocking it changes nothing about how the site works.
Third parties
Cloudflare serves this site, provides its DNS, terminates the TLS connection, and carries traffic to my machine, under its own privacy policy. The honest claim is that there are no third-party analytics or trackers here, rather than that there are no third parties at all.
If you email me, I have your email. That is between us and has nothing to do with the counter.