Last updated: [date the site goes live]
Short version
MJR News is a newsletter I run by myself, published on a site I completely control, with almost nothing in the middle. I collect very little: your email address if you subscribe, payment information handled by Stripe (not me) if you support the site as a paid member, and basic cookie-less page statistics so I can tell whether people are reading. Your information is never sold, rented, shared for advertising, or used to track you — not now, not ever.
Who runs this
MJR News is a personal project by Mark J. Remillard. The site is self-hosted: it runs Ghost, an open source program for publications, on a server I control in Sweden. The domain, the articles, the theme, and the subscriber list are all mine. No hosting company holds my content, and there are no advertising or marketing platforms involved.
What information I collect
When you subscribe, I collect your email address, and the name you give me if you volunteer one. That is the primary personal information this site holds.
When you pay, your payment is handled by Stripe, the company I use for payments. Your credit card or payment details are entered with and stored by Stripe, not on my server — see Stripe's privacy policy for their practices. All I ever see is that a payment succeeded, its amount, and its date. (I am working toward an option to support the site with cryptocurrency, which would put even fewer third parties in the payment path.)
When you visit, the server keeps a basic access log: your IP address, the date and time, the page you viewed, the site you came from if your browser shares it, and your browser and device type. This is standard practice, and it is what makes the statistics below possible. IP addresses in these logs are deleted after 14 days.
Email delivery: Mailgun
I don't operate my own outgoing mail service. Newsletter emails are sent through Mailgun (a product of Sinch), which means two things they receive: your email address, and your name if you provided one. Mailgun may also record whether an email was opened or a link clicked, and report that back to me, so I can tell whether the newsletter is reaching your inbox. They receive nothing else — no payment information and no reading or account data beyond what the email itself contains. Mailgun's own practices are governed by its privacy policy.
Readership statistics
To see which articles people read and where they come from, I use the built-in, cookie-less web analytics that ship with Ghost. For each page view it records the page itself, where you arrived from, any UTM campaign tags in the link, and roughly your country (inferred from your timezone, not your location or IP); your browser and language. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device, and there is no mechanism in it to identify you or follow you across sites. These statistics are stored on my own server. I do not send readership data to any third-party analytics cloud.
What I do not do
No cookies or trackers. No cookies, no advertising pixels, no social-media tracking, no site fingerprinting of any kind.
No selling or sharing. I will never sell, rent, trade, or hand over your information for advertising, marketing, or profiling — or for any commercial purpose. A newsletter about privacy whose author ran an ad tracker would betray the whole premise of it.
No dark patterns. You can unsubscribe in a couple of clicks at the bottom of any email, and you will not be nagged to change your mind.
How long it is kept
Server access logs (including IP addresses) are deleted after 14 days. Statistics become the small aggregate numbers they are — counts of readers and articles — rather than per-visit data, kept for as long as I run the site. Your subscription and membership records are kept for as long as you are a subscriber; when you unsubscribe, I delete your address and name. Payment records are kept for the period my tax and accounting obligations require, and only through Stripe.
Your rights
Where the GDPR or a similar data protection law applies to you, the newsletter is based on your consent, payment processing on the membership contract, and the limited logging and statistics above on my legitimate interest in running the site and measuring whether it is working. You have the right to ask what I hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw your consent at any time. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority — though I would rather settle it by email first.
Questions
If you have a question about this policy, or want an item deleted or corrected, email me at contact@mjr.news. I will answer promptly and plainly.