The best thing I can say about your privacy in relation to luxagraf.net is that the site is completely self-contained. I load no code from outside services, use nothing to track you that I myself do not control. And since I don’t have any desire to track you, I do not.
That said, be aware that every server on the internet has certain information about you the minute you connect to it. Servers, being what they are, record that you were here and some basic info about you, the operating system you use, the web browser, screen size, geographic location and so on. Again every server on the internet records the same information. That’s worth pondering, though there’s nothing you or I can really do about it.
Tracking
I endeavor to use no cookies, though I think Django may set one if you comment or sign up for the newsletter.
This site will never show ads.
If you chose to sign up for the newsletter I do store your email address in my database. I do not share this address with anyone else under any circumstances.
Part of the reason I wrote my own software to run the mailing list — which was a huge pain the ass I might add — was to make sure no one, including me, was tracking what happens after that email is sent.
The links in my newsletter are just links, I don’t track whether you click them. Perhaps you did not know this, but most links in email newsletters go first to whatever hosting service the person is using, where a unique identifier is used to record that you specifically (identifiable by id and email) have clicked that link. Then, and only then, are you redirected to the page you wanted to see. I think that’s creepy. That’s surveillance. It’s become so common and so casual most of us don’t even think about it anymore.
I’m not sure, but I think that the authors of these newsletters do this to try to figure out what you like.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but what you like doesn’t influence what I write. I write what I like. I don’t want or need to spy on you to figure out what I want to say, I already know what I want to say. If you like it, presumably you stay subscribed. If you don’t you unsubscribe and go on your merry way. But the whole track who reads what, which links they click and so on? I don’t need to know that. And I can’t sleep well at night knowing I’m letting someone else have that information about you (which I would be if I used one of the many services on the web).
Even if you don’t care about your privacy, I do. So I wrote my own software, which does not track you. I have no idea if you even open my newsletter, let alone what you do with it. I treat it as an email I send to you, as if we were friends, nothing more.
SSL
You may notice that luxagraf uses SSL through out the site. This is supposedly more secure, though I happen to think it’s mostly theatre. There are some edge cases where SSL is genuinely helpful to people, but those are edge cases. For most of us it’s pointless complexity. SSL took over the web because Google pushed it as a way to raise the barrier of entry and complexity of the web so that fewer people can create their own place on the web and seek instead a place Google or Facebook or whatever company has created for them. SSL is a tool designed (innocently I believe) to drive people to the corporate web.
Hosting Server
I’ve hosted this site on half a dozen servers, currently it’s hosted on BuyVM because I wanted to support small businesses on the web. I’ve been entirely satisfied with BuyVM.