Privacy

Shippeth sets no tracking cookies, runs no analytics that identify you, and has no accounts. Two things are stored in your browser, both in local storage and neither of them leaving your device: your light or dark preference under shippeth-theme, and whether the stream repeats the entries that already lead the page, under shippeth-stream-repeat.

Reach measurement

We count page views on the server instead of loading an analytics script in your browser. There is no Google Analytics here and no third party involved. Two reasons: a script that a third party serves can see more than we need it to, and a large share of this audience blocks such scripts anyway, which makes the numbers both invasive and wrong.

What is stored is a counter per page and hour: the date, the hour in UTC, the path, the filters that were set, the words typed into the search box, cut to sixty characters and put in lower case, and how often that combination was requested, alongside the same counter per referring host, the host only and never the full address. The search terms are kept because they say what people look for and fail to find, which decides what we take in next. No IP address, no identifier, no cookie, and in this counter no user agent. The counter behind the outbound links stays coarser still, at one figure per day, because that one is tied to a particular item rather than to a page.

Beside it stands one more counter of the same shape, of who knocked: the date, the hour in UTC, a name out of our own list, the user agent the request sent, cut to two hundred characters, and how often that combination arrived. The name is ours, so a browser counts as “reader”, a search engine under its own name, and anything we do not recognise as “other-bot”. It exists because the figures on this page count readers and hold machines back, and the question of how many machines there were had no answer anywhere except in a server log.

The user agent sits beside the name because the name is a judgement and judgements turn out wrong. On 20 September 2026, 335 of that day’s 345 requests counted as readers were two machines working through a list of file names in the hope of finding a key lying about, behind a user agent that said Safari. We could see that the name was wrong and could not correct it, because the string it had been read from was gone. Keeping the string lets a corrected rule run back over the days already counted. It is emptied again after thirty days, once a wrong name is no longer worth correcting, and the count and the name stay.

A user agent names a browser, a version and an operating system, which is a description most visitors share with many thousands of others. It is still the most telling thing this site keeps, so it is worth saying what is not kept beside it: no IP address, no identifier, no cookie, no session, and no time finer than the hour. On its own it points at a kind of browser rather than at a person, and there is nothing here to join it to.

A counter of this shape holds no trace of who did the counting: there is no session, therefore no sequence of pages, therefore no visit to reconstruct. Two people reading the same page in the same hour are indistinguishable from one person reading it twice. Unknown query parameters are discarded rather than stored.

The same applies to the counter behind the outbound links: how often an item was opened or shared, per day, and nothing else.

What we count stands in full on this page and on /method. Our own reach figures are not published. They say how the site is doing, which is our business, and they say nothing about you.

What the server sees

Standard web server logs: IP address, time, requested page, user agent. They are used to keep the service running and are deleted after 14 days. They are not connected to the counters above.

Fonts

Typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address when the page loads. We intend to self-host them.

Outbound links

Links to sources run through /go/<id> on this site, which records that the item was opened and then forwards you to the source. The destination stands in the link’s tooltip before you click, and the feed links to it directly.

What is stored is a row with four fields: which item, whether it was an open or a share, which channel, and when. No IP address, no user agent, no identifier, no cookie. The rows cannot be linked to you or to each other, which is why this needs no consent banner and no retention period.

Not counted: search engine crawlers, and browser prefetches, so hovering a link does not register as a visit.

We read the numbers ourselves, to see which items people find worth opening. They stand nowhere on the site and they influence the ranking nowhere. See the method.

Your rights

The controller is Stereum Services FlexCo, Leitzersbrunnerfeld 24, A-2003 Stockerau, Austria, reachable at office@stereum.com. The counters described above hold no personal data, so nothing in them can be traced to a reader. The server logs do hold an IP address, and they rest on Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR, our interest in keeping the service running and in finding what breaks it. They are deleted after 14 days.

You may ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, ask for the processing to be restricted, and object to it, by writing to the address above. A complaint goes to the Österreichische Datenschutzbehörde, Barichgasse 40-42, 1030 Vienna.

Contact

Stereum Services FlexCo, Leitzersbrunnerfeld 24, A-2003 Stockerau, Austria, office@stereum.com. See the imprint.