Privacy Policy

Information I Collect

I collect information in a few specific ways:

• Contact form: Your name, email, message, and the topic you pick when you reach out
• Newsletter: Your email address when you subscribe
• Milo chat: Your conversation history is stored locally in your browser. Your questions and Milo's answers are also logged server-side (with a hashed IP, never the raw address) to help improve quality
• Shop: Items you add to your cart are kept in your browser. Checkout, including shipping and payment details, happens on my payment providers' secure hosted pages (see below)
• Error reports: If something breaks, I log the technical error details (message, page, and browser type) with a hashed IP to help me fix it
• Analytics: Which pages you visit and when, plus your browser and device type, the page that sent you here, and an approximate location (usually country or city) worked out from your IP address
• IP addresses: Temporarily used for rate limiting and bot prevention to stop abuse

How I Use Your Information

• Respond to your contact form messages
• Send you newsletter updates (only if you subscribe)
• Provide AI chat assistance through Milo
• Fulfill shop orders through my payment providers
• Diagnose and fix errors
• Measure how many people visit the site and which pages they read
• Prevent abuse through rate limiting and bot prevention

Third-Party Services

I use trusted third-party services to run this site:

• Beehiiv: Manages my newsletter. Their privacy policy
• Resend: Delivers contact form emails (transactional only)
• Cloudflare Turnstile: Bot prevention on forms. Your IP is shared with Cloudflare to verify you're human
• Anthropic: Generates Milo's chat responses (Claude)
• OpenAI: Turns your Milo question into a search embedding so the right content can be retrieved (no chat content is used to train their models)
• Cohere: May be used to improve the relevance of Milo's search results. When enabled, your question text is sent for ranking only
• Creem: Processes payments for digital products. Their terms
• Fourthwall: Runs the merch shop and its checkout. Shipping, email, and payment details are collected on their hosted checkout. Their privacy policy
• Vercel: Hosts this website, stores product images, and provides cookieless, privacy-friendly analytics (page views, the page that sent you here, and an approximate location)
• Ahrefs: Cookieless web analytics I use to see how the site does in search. It counts page views without setting cookies or building a profile of you
• Google Analytics: Counts page views and shows me how people move through the site. Unlike the two above, it sets cookies (see below). Google's privacy policy
• Neon: Database for newsletter records, chat logs, error logs, and rate limiting

Cookies & Local Storage

I keep it simple:

• Functional cookies: One remembers if you've subscribed to the newsletter (expires after 1 year); one remembers your display preferences across mattdowney.com
• Local storage: Stores your Milo chat history, shopping cart, and UI preferences (like sound and theme) in your browser
• Cookieless analytics: Vercel and Ahrefs set no cookies and build no personal profile of you
• Google Analytics cookies: Google sets cookies (named _ga and similar) that tell one visit apart from the next. They last up to two years. Google does not store your full IP address. You can block or clear them in your browser, or install Google's opt-out add-on
• No ads: I don't run ads on this site and I use no advertising or cross-site tracking

Data Retention

• Contact emails: Retained per Resend's policy
• Newsletter: Until you unsubscribe
• Chat history: Browser-side history can be cleared anytime. Server-side logs are retained for quality improvement
• Error logs: Retained while I investigate and fix issues
• Rate limit data: Automatically deleted after 24 hours
• Analytics: Vercel and Ahrefs keep page view counts, not records about you. Google Analytics keeps visit data for up to 14 months

Your Rights

You have control over your data:

• Unsubscribe from the newsletter anytime via the link in any email
• Clear your Milo chat history, cart, and preferences in your browser's local storage
• Clear or block cookies in your browser settings
• Opt out of Google Analytics with Google's browser add-on
• Contact me for any data-related requests

Security

I take reasonable measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, loss, or misuse. However, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure.

Children's Privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13. I don't knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided me with their information, please contact me and I'll remove it.

Changes to This Policy

I may update this policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date. Continued use of the site after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Reach out through the contact form.