What this site knows about you

This is the privacy policy, and it is short because there is little to describe. This site is a folder of files on a web host. It runs no analytics, sets no cookies, has no accounts, no comments, and no advertising. Reading it makes no request to anybody else’s server — there is exactly one place where you can choose to make one, a recording on the home page that fetches nothing until you press play, and it has its own section below. There is one field on the whole site, on the finding aid, and it never submits anywhere. Two things nevertheless happen when you read a page, and both are below.

Last updated 11 September 2026. Any change to this page gets an entry in the accession register, the same as a correction to a sheet — so we may update this policy from time to time is not something we have to ask you to accept on trust.

What your own browser keeps Link to this section

Seven keys, in your browser’s local storage, and every one of them only if you ask for it. This paragraph said two values until 13 September 2026, which had been wrong since the reading settings arrived and added five more — a policy that miscounts what it describes is a policy that is wrong about you, so it is corrected here and logged in the register like any other correction.

qe-ground: Which ground you asked for — the daylight sheet or the cabinet. Holds the word daylight or cabinet, and nothing else.
qe-plain: Whether you asked for plain view, which switches off the display faces, the wonk, the rotation and the motion. Holds 1, or is absent.
qe-motion, qe-contrast, qe-spacing, qe-textsize, qe-font: The five reading settings, under Reading at the top of every page. The first three hold on or off; qe-textsize holds larger or largest; qe-font holds the name of one of nine typefaces. Any of them may also be absent — and absent is the state that matters: it means we follow whatever your own device asks for, which for text size is the default size your browser is already set to. Only a choice made here overrides that. Follow my device again removes all five and hands you back to your device.
qe-edits: followed by a page address: Only if you are one of the two people who edit this site, and only if you deliberately start the editor. Nothing on any page loads it; it arrives from a bookmark, and until then this key does not exist. While it does, it holds the words you have changed on that one page, so a half-finished edit survives a reload. It goes nowhere — the editor cannot save to the site and has no account to save with, and the only way out is the Copy my edits button, which puts the change on your own clipboard for you to paste wherever you choose. Undo all removes it.

None of them is a cookie and none is ever sent anywhere. Local storage is not attached to requests the way a cookie is; these values stay in the browser that wrote them, on the device that wrote them. We cannot read them, and nothing on this site tries to. Clearing your site data removes them and the page goes back to following your system’s own light or dark preference.

They identify nobody. There is no visitor id here, random or otherwise, and no way to recognise a returning reader.

What the host sees Link to this section

The site is served by Netlify, which acts as our hosting processor. Asking any web server for a page necessarily tells it who is asking, so Netlify’s access logs record your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string, and which address you requested. Under the GDPR an IP address is personal data, which is why this page exists at all.

We do not use those logs for analytics and we do not build anything from them. The lawful basis is legitimate interests — serving the site and keeping it up. We do not set or control their retention period, and we would rather say that plainly than name a number we cannot enforce; Netlify’s own privacy notice governs what it keeps and for how long.

What is deliberately not here Link to this section

No analytics of any kind. No page-view counter, no tag manager, no heatmap, no session recording. We do not know how many people read this.
No cookies. The word document.cookie does not appear anywhere in this site’s code, which is why there is no consent banner: there is nothing to consent to, and a banner would be theatre.
No third-party requests you did not ask for. Until 9 September 2026 the pages loaded their two typefaces from Google’s font CDN, which told Google your IP address and user agent on every page load, before you had read a word. The fonts are now served from this domain and that request is gone. Nothing on this site now reaches another server on its own account. The things that can reach another server all need a press first, and they are described below. This line has now been corrected twice: it once said the fonts were the only third-party request, which stopped being true the day the first recording was mounted, and it then said there was exactly one such recording, which stopped being true when Sheet No. 11 mounted two more. Both corrections are in the register, and the count is no longer written into this sentence — a number that has already gone stale twice is a number this page should not be keeping.
No accounts and no comments, and nothing that submits. There is exactly one place on this site to type: the search field on the finding aid. It has no server behind it. What you type is matched against a file your browser has already downloaded, inside your browser, and it is never sent anywhere — not to us, because there is no us to send it to. Until 9 September 2026 this line said there was nowhere on the site to type anything at all; the field is new and the line was corrected in the same change that added it, which is in the register.
No advertising, and nothing sold or shared. There is no commercial arrangement here to share anything under.

What you search for Link to this section

The finding aid searches this whole site, and it does the searching in your browser. Your browser fetches one file from this domain — search-index.json, the text of every page — and everything after that happens on your machine. There is no search server, no search API, and no third party involved, so the request our host logs is a request for that one file and nothing about what you were looking for.

The search term is not in the address, and that is deliberate. The usual way to make a search shareable is ?q=, which is part of the URL a browser sends — so every term anybody typed would be written into the hosting log described above. Here it goes after the # instead: /search#q=lavender. Browsers never send the part after the # to a server. The link is still shareable and still bookmarkable, and the word you searched for reaches nobody, including us.

Nothing about a search is remembered. There is no history of recent searches, nothing added to local storage, and the two values described at the top of this page are still the only two things this site stores.

One thing worth being plain about, since it is the general case and not ours: your browser’s own address bar may remember the address, fragment and all. That is your browser’s history on your own device, not something this site does or can see — but on a shared machine it is the copy that would tell somebody what you looked up.

The one embedded thing Link to this section

There are eight embedded recordings on this site, and they are the only places where another company can learn anything about you. All eight are on YouTube, which is Google, and all eight behave identically:

T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land, at the foot of the home page.
Townes Van Zandt playing Waitin’ Around to Die, on Sheet No. 11.
Nirvana’s Polly, on the same sheet.
Philip Glass playing Mad Rush, on Sheet No. 12.
Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9, played by Renaud Capuçon and Frank Braley, on the same sheet.
Dolly Parton, I Believe in You, on Sheet No. 14.
Dolly Parton, Travelin’ Thru, on the same sheet.
Dolly Parton singing for her vaccine at Vanderbilt, on the same sheet.

Google is still one party, however many recordings there are, and that is the fact this section is really about. Every recording added since the first has added another place where you can choose to reach the company that was already here, and has not added a company.

Two of them sat on this site unlisted here, and that is worth saying out loud rather than quietly correcting. The Glass and the Beethoven shipped with Sheet No. 12 and this page went on saying there were three recordings, which made it false about its own subject for as long as that stood. Nothing gates the count — tools/check-metadata.mjs checks that every third-party origin our scripts can reach is named on this page, and one origin covers any number of videos, so a missing recording is invisible to it. The list is kept by hand, and a hand-kept list is the kind this site keeps warning about.

Nothing is fetched from any of them until you press play. What each page actually contains is a picture we drew and a link. No YouTube script, no YouTube thumbnail, no invisible pixel, no preconnect hint — a reader who never presses play makes exactly the same requests as a reader of a page with no recording on it at all, which is to say requests to this domain and no other. That is checked by tools/check-metadata.mjs on every run, and the check reads our JavaScript as well as our markup, because a script that quietly reaches a third party would otherwise make this paragraph false while every page looked clean.

What happens if you do press it. Your browser asks www.youtube-nocookie.com for a video player, and Google learns your IP address, your user-agent string, and which video you asked for. It is told that you arrived from queering.earth and is not told which page you were on, because of the referrer policy described below. From that moment Google’s privacy policy applies to that player, not ours, and we have no visibility into it and no arrangement with them.

Why www.youtube-nocookie.com and what it does not mean. It is Google’s own privacy-enhanced player domain, and it does not set advertising cookies on load the way the ordinary embed does. It is not anonymous, and we are not going to describe it as though it were: your IP address still reaches Google, and Google is still able to record that a request was made. No cookies and no tracking are different claims and only the first one is being made here.

Without JavaScript the link is just a link. The play control is an ordinary link to the video, upgraded by a small script into something that opens the player in place. Turn scripts off and pressing it takes you to YouTube instead, which is the same choice by a more obvious route. Either way it is a request you made.

Why it is here at all, given the rest of this page. Because Ryan and Helen listen to that recording together, and a site about reading things closely is a strange place to make you leave in order to hear one. The cost is stated rather than hidden, it costs nothing until you choose to pay it, and if that trade is not one you want, the poem itself is quoted on the page in text and the reading is a link you can follow on your own terms.

Links to other places Link to this section

Nearly every sheet cites its sources, so the pages are full of links out — to journals, archives, libraries, and the writers we are reading. Following one of those takes you somewhere we do not control, and that site will see you arrive under its own policy, not this one.

The one thing we do about it: every response here sends Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin, so a site you click through to is told that you came from queering.earth and is not told which page you were reading. Which sheet you had open is nobody else’s business.

Your rights, and why most of them have nothing to work on Link to this section

Under the UK and EU GDPR you have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to portability, and to complain to a supervisory authority. Those rights are real and we are not qualifying them.

But we hold no store of reader data for them to reach. There is no database, no mailing list, and no account. The only personal data connected to your reading of this site is in a hosting log we do not own, and we could not find your record in it if you asked, because we have nothing to match you against. If you want that log addressed, Netlify is the party who holds it.

If you are in the UK you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office; elsewhere in Europe, to your own national authority.

Who we are Link to this section

Queering Earth is a collaboration between the Stimpunks Foundation and More Realms, who are the joint controllers for anything described above. For a privacy question, or for anything else about this site, either of those sites will reach us, and the repository’s issues are the fastest route — that is where corrections to the sheets are raised too, and they are answered in public.

Not legal advice, and not written by a lawyer. This page describes what the code does, and it was checked against the code rather than adapted from a template. If it is wrong about a fact, that is a correction and it belongs in the register — say so and it will be.