Privacy policy

Effective and last updated: 1 October 2026

This website is a static site hosted on GitHub Pages. It sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and carries no advertising trackers. A few features do reach out to other companies on your behalf — comments, private notes, video, the contact form — and each of them is named below.

Who is responsible

This site, and anything you send through it, are the responsibility of Nell Watson (Nell Watson Ltd), 11 Kingfisher Business Park, Arthur Street, Lakeside, Redditch B98 8LG, United Kingdom.

Hosting

Pages are served by GitHub Pages, which may log standard technical request data (such as IP addresses) for security and operational purposes; see GitHub’s privacy statement.

Contact form

If you use the contact form, the details you submit are processed by Formspree and delivered to us so we can respond. We do not use those details for marketing. Enquiries are kept only as long as they are useful for answering you and for any follow-up, and are then deleted. To see, correct, or delete anything you have sent us, write via the contact page and say so.

Lawful basis

When you contact us, we use the details you choose to provide because it is in our legitimate interests to answer a communication you initiated. Where your enquiry is about entering into a contract, the processing may instead be necessary to take steps at your request before that contract. We use the information only for the conversation and related administration, and do not add it to a marketing list.

Comments

New comments under essays are handled by giscus, which stores them as GitHub Discussions in a public repository rather than on this site. Opening the comments on an essay loads a script and an embedded frame from giscus.app, which necessarily discloses your IP address and browser details to giscus and to GitHub. Signing in to leave a comment is an action on your own GitHub account, governed by GitHub’s privacy statement; we never see your GitHub credentials. Older comments carried over from the previous version of this site are plain text served from here, with no third party involved.

Private reader notes

Essays on this site let you send us a private note: a comment on a passage, a suggested edit, or a note about an essay as a whole. These are separate from the public comments described above.

Who sees your note. Only Nell Watson and the editorial team. Notes are never published as comments and are not visible to other readers.

What we collect. The text of your note, the passage you selected and the address of the page, and the time you sent it. Your name and email address only if you choose to give them, and whether you would like to be thanked by name.

What we do not collect. We do not store your IP address. To prevent spam we keep a one-way, salted hash of it that changes every day and is deleted within two days. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person is sending the note. It loads only when you open the note panel, and Cloudflare’s privacy policy applies to it.

Where it is stored. In a database run for us by Cloudflare (Cloudflare Workers and D1). Cloudflare may process it outside the UK and EU, under its data processing terms, which provide the safeguards UK and EU law require for such transfers.

How we use it. To correct and improve the work. If you asked to be thanked, we keep your name on a list of contributors so that we can thank you in the work if we use your note.

Your rights in what you send. When you send a note you agree that we may use, edit, adapt and publish it in any edition or format without payment, and you waive your rights in it as far as the law allows (the full wording is next to the Send button).

Keeping and deleting. After sending, you get a private link where you can see your notes, read any reply, and delete any note at any time. You can also ask us to delete your notes via the contact page. Spam is deleted after 30 days. Notes we don’t use are deleted two years after you send them. Notes we use are kept for as long as the work is published, with your name if you asked to be thanked; their email address is deleted after two years.

In your browser. The note panel keeps a random key and a short list of your notes in your browser’s local storage, so it can show your private link and lightly highlight passages you have commented on. If you leave “Remember my name and email” ticked, it also keeps the name and email you last gave, so you don’t have to type them again; untick it to forget them. The key reaches us only when you send a note or open your private notes page, and we store only a scrambled form of it. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.

Legal basis. We rely on your consent, which you give when you send a note. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your notes.

Your rights. You can ask for a copy of your notes, have them corrected or deleted, or object to how we use them, using the contact details on this page. If you are unhappy with how we handle them, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk) or the data protection authority where you live.

Who is responsible. The data controller for reader notes is Eleanor (Nell) Watson, EthicsNet Ltd (company number 11412076), 11 Kingfisher Business Park, Arthur Street, Lakeside, Redditch, B98 8LG, United Kingdom.

Age. Notes are for people aged 13 or over.

Embedded media

Talks and interviews appear first as still images served from this site. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play; at that point a player loads from youtube-nocookie.com, and Google’s practices apply to it. Talks hosted elsewhere — Vimeo, TED, and the like — open on those sites directly.

Local preferences

A few of your choices are remembered in your browser’s local storage: the light or dark theme you pick for the playground games, whether those games make sounds, and what a few of them save for you, such as your Constitution answers, your best Flywheel score and your Problem Solver notes. These stay on your device, are never sent to us, and disappear when you clear this site’s data.

External links

Linked sites — booksellers, social platforms, press outlets, YouTube, Google Drive, Wikiwand and others — have their own privacy practices, which we do not control.

Your rights

Depending on the circumstances, you may ask for access to your personal information, correction, deletion, restriction of its use, or object to processing based on legitimate interests. Use the contact page and describe the request. We may need enough information to confirm that the data is yours.

Questions and complaints

Use the contact page for a question or complaint. If it is a data protection complaint, please say so. We will acknowledge it within 30 days, investigate it, and explain the outcome. If you remain unhappy, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Changes to this policy

Material changes will appear on this page with a new effective date.

For the Beddy Butler app, see its dedicated privacy policy.