What we collect, and what we don’t.

What we collect.

Email address. Only if you give it to us in a signup form. We send the emails you ticked and nothing else: the status-flip alert, and if you chose them, the Monday digest, the Crisis Pressure High alert, or the quarterly snapshot link. We keep your choices beside your address.

IP address (transient). When your browser requests a page, the IP is part of the request like every web request. We use it briefly for rate limiting (so a single address can’t hammer the form or the data API), and it appears in server access logs the hosting provider keeps for operational debugging. Rate-limit records are short-lived. Server access logs follow the hosting provider’s standard log rotation. The signup and quarterly-report forms also store the IP address with the request. For a quarterly report request we keep the email, the quarter and the IP address for 30 days. If that quarter’s report isn’t published yet, we keep them until 14 days after the quarter ends, if that is later, so we can email you the report when it is. Once we’ve sent it, we delete them 30 days after the send.

Embedded widgets. If a site embeds one of our widgets, each load adds one impression to a count for that site’s host name. We record the widget name and the host name, and we log no IP address in that line. The widget sets no cookies. The access-log note above still applies to the request itself.

Browser notifications. If you turn them on, we store the push token your browser issues, and its user-agent string, so we can reach it.

Tips. Stripe takes card payments on its own page, so we never see your card number. Stripe tells us the email you gave it, the amount and a charge id, and we keep those as a record. XRP tips are public on the XRP Ledger because that’s how the ledger works.

Aggregated, cookie-less analytics. Page views, country (derived from IP, then discarded), and referrer are recorded in aggregate by a privacy-focused analytics provider. No cookies, no individual identifiers, no cross-site tracking. The data shows up as “1,247 visits this week from Germany”, never as a profile of a specific visitor.

What we don’t collect.

We don’t collect names, location beyond country-from-IP, browsing history, or anything from third-party trackers. We never see or store card numbers. What we hold is what it takes to send the emails you asked for, record a tip, and keep the dashboard reachable.

Where the data lives.

Email addresses, preferences, tip records and push tokens are stored in Google Cloud Firestore. Resend delivers the email. Stripe processes card tips and API pass payments. If you buy a pass, we keep a record beside a hash of your key: your email address, the Stripe subscription id and customer id, the first eight characters of the key, the pass status, the date we issued it and the date we last checked its status with Stripe. That lets us tell whether the pass is still paid. We don’t store the full key. Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers browser notifications. Upstash holds short-lived rate-limit counters, keyed by IP or email address. Umami counts page views without cookies; its script is served from our own domain. Cloudflare sits in front of the site as a CDN and firewall and doesn’t keep subscriber email content.

Subprocessors may change. If we move email delivery, the CDN, or the database to a different vendor, we will update this page to name the current set. We will not introduce a new category of subprocessor (for example, an analytics service that handles personal data, or any third party beyond infrastructure and email delivery) without giving existing subscribers reasonable advance notice.

We do not sell, rent, license, or share subscriber email addresses with anyone outside the infrastructure subprocessors above. The list exists only to send the emails you chose. If that ever changes, we will give existing subscribers reasonable advance notice and a clear opportunity to opt out before any new use takes effect.

How long we keep it.

Active subscribers. Until you unsubscribe.

After you unsubscribe. Clicking the unsubscribe link in any email marks the row as unsubscribed and stops sending. The row itself is kept so that an accidental re-signup using the same address does not start the flow over. To have the row deleted entirely, email hello@straits.live from the address you signed up with, or with the originally-used address in the body. We aim to process deletion requests promptly; the legal maximum response window under GDPR is 30 days.

Pending double opt-in. If you submitted an email but never clicked the confirmation link, you get no further email. The confirmation link stops working after seven days, and we delete an unconfirmed address within a day or so after that.

Rate-limit IP records. Transient: kept only as long as needed to apply the per-IP rate window, then discarded.

Server access logs. Limited retention, following the hosting provider’s standard log rotation. Used only for operational debugging.

Your rights.

If you are in the EU, UK, California, or any of the other jurisdictions whose data-protection laws give you these rights, you have them whether or not the law specifically applies to Straits:

• Access: we will send you any data we hold associated with your email address.
• Correction: if anything is wrong, we will fix it.
• Deletion: we will remove the row entirely on request.
• Portability: we will export your data in a machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent: at any time, by unsubscribing or by emailing us.

Send any of these requests to hello@straits.live. We aim to reply promptly; the legal maximum response window under GDPR is 30 days.

Cookies.

Straits sets no cookies of its own and uses no third-party tracking cookies. Our analytics provider operates without cookies. The CDN may set short-lived security cookies on requests it identifies as suspicious; these expire quickly and exist only to help the firewall distinguish a returning bot from a one-off request. None of these cookies tracks browsing behaviour or identifies a visitor across sites.

Children.

Straits is not directed at children under 13 (US) or under 16 (EU), and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has subscribed using your address, email us and we will remove the entry.

Changes to this policy.

If we change this policy in any way that materially affects how existing subscriber data is handled, we will give existing subscribers reasonable advance notice, by email, or by prominent notice on the site. Cosmetic changes (rephrasing, link updates, formatting) and updates to subprocessor names will be made in place and noted by the “Last updated” date below.

9 October 2026: we brought this page up to date. It now lists Stripe (card tips, added June 2026), Umami (page-view counts, added August 2026), Upstash (rate limiting, added May 2026) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (browser notifications, added May 2026). Those went in without the notice this page promises, and that was our mistake. From here on, a new kind of processor gets a dated line here before it goes live.

12 October 2026: we added the API pass, paid through Stripe. Each pass has one record in Firestore with the fields listed under “Where the data lives”, kept beside a hash of the key.

13 October 2026: the quarterly report now goes out by itself when a quarter closes. Before, a request for a quarter with no report yet got no email and nothing sent it later. We now keep that request until the report is published, up to 14 days after the quarter ends, then send the link. After the send we delete the request 30 days later.