Privacy
Short, and specific about the two things on this site that send anything anywhere: the counting, which is anonymous, and the chat, which is not.
What is collected today
No third-party tag runs here. No Google Analytics, no external font, no embedded widget. Every request your browser makes while reading a page — including every image on every article, and the one measurement script below — goes to hyperfocusbear.com and nowhere else. Reading writes nothing to your device except the word “light” or “dark” if you use the theme switch, and, only if you ask for it, an opt-out flag (see below): preferences, not identifiers, and neither ever leaves your machine. The Brilliant chat is different, and says so before you use it: see below.
The Brilliant chat: you are identified
Brilliant is the exception, on purpose. Some visitors came to tease her rather than talk, and counting alone could not show who, so she now talks only to visitors who introduce themselves: the chat opens after you agree, on a screen that says what follows. What you send goes to this site, which forwards it to an inference server I own and run in my office. No model provider, analytics service or other third party receives your messages.
Recorded for every conversation: your IP address; your browser, operating system and preferred languages; the country, city and network Cloudflare places the connection in; a device fingerprint (screen size, time zone, processor and graphics characteristics) and a random identifier stored in your browser, both so that the same visitor is recognised on another network; the time of each message; and which of Brilliant’s safety checks decided each answer. Not recorded: what you type — with one exception, next.
When a safety check fires — swearing, questions about my private life or employer, attempts to rewrite her instructions, role-play aimed at the same — or when Brilliant declines to answer, or the conversation your page sends back cannot be verified as hers (an expired session does that too), the whole conversation, every message on both sides, is saved with the record above, and I am sent an email saying that it happened (the email carries no message text). I read these conversations. An IP address or device that keeps at it can be blocked from the chat; the rest of the site stays open to it.
Where and how long: the records and saved conversations are kept in storage I rent from OVH, in the EU, and deleted after 90 days. A block lasts until I lift it. Only I read them; nothing is sold or shared. The legal basis is your consent for what is read from your browser (the fingerprint and identifier), and my legitimate interest in protecting the chat from abuse for the rest (GDPR art. 6(1)(a) and (f)). You can ask what is held about you, or for it to be deleted, at jerzyk.majchrzak@gmail.com; the controller is Jerzy Marek Majchrzak. Not agreeing costs you the chat and nothing else.
One honest caveat: this site is served through Cloudflare, so Cloudflare handles the request in transit as it does for every page here. The conversation is also held in your browser tab so Brilliant can follow the thread — close the tab, or press “Start again”, and your copy is gone.
“Save this conversation” writes a copy in your own browser; nothing is uploaded to produce it. The file ends with a signed block, so anyone can check that the saved conversation, up to its last reply, is genuine and unaltered; checking stores nothing. Brilliant also has limits, so that one visitor cannot make her unusable for everybody else: a turn limit per visit, a few questions a minute, a daily limit per visitor, and a daily limit across the whole site.
Besides the above, I see the day’s totals: how many questions were asked and refused and why, how many people chatted and from which countries, which safety checks decided the answers, and how many page-view counts were written or failed. Each day’s totals are replaced by the next day’s.
The measurement, in full
This site counts page views, how long a page is read, how far it is scrolled, which sections come into view, and clicks on links leading off the site. That is the whole list. It is first-party: the script is served from this domain and posts to this site’s own Worker, which writes to storage I rent. No cookie is set and nothing is stored on your device (unless you ask it to remember an opt-out, below), so there is nothing here to consent to and no banner to dismiss — which is the point. The measurement never stores an IP address, User-Agent string, referrer or query string, and nothing is shared with anybody.
Each page load is counted on its own. A random number is generated in the page’s memory to tie together the events from that one load, and it is gone the moment you navigate away — it is never written down, so reading three articles here is three unconnected page loads and not a trail. That is a deliberate loss of useful data: I cannot tell how many pages one person read. It is the price of not having to ask you for anything, and it is worth it.
If you would rather not be counted at all, add ?notrack to the address of any page here and nothing is sent for that page. That is not remembered, so it applies only to the page you open with it. To opt out for good in one browser, open hyperfocusbear.com/?notrack=always: that stores one flag in your browser’s localStorage, with no identifier and nothing else in it, and the measurement then skips every page you open there. ?notrack=never removes the flag. Nothing is stored unless you do this. Blocking JavaScript for this domain, or blocking the request to /a/e, stops all of it.
Questions
The site is built in the open. If something here is unclear or wrong, say so and I will fix it.