Privacy

The short version

This site collects as little as it can. It asks for your email address only if you choose to subscribe, it uses one analytics tool, and it does not sell your information to anyone, ever.

What is collected

Your email address, if you give it. When you subscribe to the newsletter, your email address is sent to Kit, the email platform used to send it. Two short labels are stored alongside it: one recording which page you subscribed from, and one recording which channel or campaign brought you to the site — a video, a newsletter, a link — so it is possible to tell which content is useful. Neither says anything about you personally. Nothing else about you is attached.

Basic analytics. This site uses Google Analytics 4 to count page views and understand which pages people read. That involves standard measurement data such as approximate location, device type, and referring site. It is used in aggregate. No attempt is made to identify individual visitors.

What analytics records beyond a page view. If you use the search box, the words you searched for are sent to Google Analytics — that is how it is possible to tell what people came here looking for and did not find. Pressing play on a video records which video, and subscribing records that a subscription happened, though not who. Google’s own automatic measurement also records things like clicks on links leading off this site, how far down a page you scrolled, file downloads, and when you interact with a form. Google Signals and ad personalization are both switched off, so none of this is used to advertise to you anywhere.

Server logs. Like any website, this one is served by a host — Cloudflare — which records standard request information such as your IP address, browser and the page requested. That is how a web server works and how abuse is blocked. It is not combined with your email address and it is not used to build a profile of you.

Nothing else. There is no advertising network, no retargeting pixel, no session recording, and no data broker.

What is deliberately avoided

Some choices in how this site is built exist for privacy reasons rather than technical ones. Fonts are served from this domain instead of a font CDN, and video thumbnails are served from here rather than loaded from YouTube’s servers.

The practical effect is that simply reading a page here does not announce your visit to Google’s font service or to YouTube. Following a link to a video does, because at that point you are on YouTube and their terms apply.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies of its own. Google Analytics sets its own — that is how it recognizes a repeat visit — and you can block those with your browser settings or an extension without breaking anything here.

Who else is involved

• Kit stores and sends the newsletter, and holds subscriber email addresses.
• Google Analytics provides the page-view measurement described above.
• Cloudflare hosts and serves the site.
• Typeform handles the form on the start-here page. The form is embedded in that page, and it is only fetched once you scroll down to it or follow a link straight to it — not when the page opens. At that point your browser is talking to Typeform directly, which necessarily tells them your IP address, your browser and the page you came from, the same as visiting any website does. What you type into the form reaches them only when you submit it. No other page on this site contacts Typeform at all.

Each has its own privacy policy governing what it does with what it receives. Information is shared with them only to make the thing you asked for work.

How long any of it is kept

Your email address is kept for as long as you are on the list, and it goes when you leave. Unsubscribing stops the email; asking to be deleted removes the record itself, including the labels saying which page you subscribed from and which channel brought you here. There is no archive kept behind that.

Google Analytics is set to discard event data after 14 months. Cloudflare’s server logs are kept on Cloudflare’s own schedule, under its own policy, and are not mine to set a clock on. What I keep from Google Analytics is a periodic summary — counts by page and by day, to see whether the site is working — which contains no row about any individual visitor. The less that is collected, the less there is to keep.

Leaving the list

Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link and it takes one click. You are not asked why, and there is no sequence that tries to win you back. If you would rather be deleted outright than unsubscribed, ask and it will be done.

Your privacy rights, including in California

You can ask what personal information is held about you, ask for a copy of it, ask for it to be corrected, and ask for it to be deleted. Those requests are honored regardless of where you live. In practice the answer is short. The only things I hold directly are an email address and two short labels — which page you subscribed from, and which channel or campaign brought you to the site. Beyond that, two services hold data on my behalf: Cloudflare keeps standard server logs, which include your IP address, and Google Analytics assigns your browser a random visitor ID and records which pages were viewed. Both of those count as personal information, so if you ask me to delete what is held about you, that is part of what gets deleted.

California residents have these rights under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA: to know what is collected and why, to access it, to correct it, to delete it, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. Two of those need no action here, because the underlying thing never happens: your information is never sold or shared for cross-context behavioral advertising, and no sensitive personal information as the statute defines it is collected at all. There is also no financial incentive program, and you will never be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.

To make a request, use the contact page. If you are on the newsletter, replying to any issue reaches the same place and is the fastest route, because the reply already proves the address is yours. An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf with written permission from you.

Requests are answered within 45 days. Verification is deliberately light: the only record that exists is tied to an email address, so a request sent from that address is verified by the fact of sending it. You will not be asked for identity documents to delete an email address, and you should be suspicious of any site that does.

Separately from all of this, every newsletter has a one-click unsubscribe. You never need to invoke a legal right to stop hearing from Motion Retirement.

Security

Reasonable measures are used to protect what little is held. No method of transmission over the internet or of electronic storage is completely secure, so absolute security cannot be promised by this or any other site. The honest mitigation is the one already described above: the less that is collected, the less there is to lose.

Children

This site is intended for adults and is not directed at children. No information is knowingly collected from anyone under 18.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it. A change that materially affects what is collected or who receives it will be announced in the newsletter rather than only posted here, because nobody re-reads a privacy policy.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or a request about your own information, can go through the contact page.