Privacy Policy
Critical Monk (www.criticalmonk.com) is my personal website. Not a company, not a team. There is no account to create here, nothing to log into, and nothing to pay for. You can open this site, read it and listen to it without telling me anything about yourself.
This page explains, in plain language, what information of yours reaches me, why it reaches me, and what happens to it afterwards.
What reaches me
What you send yourself
If you email me, your name, your email address and whatever you wrote in the message arrive in my inbox. That is all of it, and only when you decide to write in the first place.
What is collected automatically
This site is built on Blogger, which is a Google service. Like every website in the world, Blogger's servers record some technical information on their own: your IP address, your browser and device type, which pages you opened, how long you stayed, and which link brought you here. Blogger also keeps its own count of page views.
None of that lands in a database of mine. It sits inside Google's systems, where it shows up to me as numbers. I open those numbers to see which pages are being useful and where something is broken. Identifying an individual reader is neither the intention nor something I have any means of doing.
How the contact form works
The form on the contact page does not save what you write anywhere on this site. Press Send and your own mail app opens with the message already filled in; you press the final send button yourself.
What that means in practice is that no third server sits in the middle. The message leaves your email and arrives at mine, the way any ordinary letter would.
Cookies
A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser. On this site they can come from three places:
- Google and Blogger, so that the site works properly and their own counts can be kept.
- Any player or content embedded inside a page, such as a video or audio player loaded from another service.
- Any advertising or measurement service in use on the site at the time.
I do not set cookies of my own and I run no tracking of my own. You can block or delete cookies from your browser settings; the site will still work, though something loaded from outside may not play as it should.
Outside services and links
Parts of this site lean on services that are not mine. Google and Blogger for hosting, and in some pages a player or piece of content loaded from elsewhere.
When your browser loads one of those, your IP address and some device information reach that service automatically. That exchange is between you and them. I have no control over it, and their own privacy policy applies there rather than this one.
The same holds for links. Once you leave this site for another one, that site's policy governs what happens next, not mine.
Advertising
Ads on this site, whenever any are shown, are served by a third-party network such as Google AdSense rather than by me.
Ad networks work by placing their own cookies in your browser, which lets them choose ads based on your earlier visits here and on other sites. Google explains its own use of advertising cookies in its policies. You can turn off personalised advertising at any time through Google's Ads Settings, or opt out of a longer list of networks at aboutads.info. Blocking those cookies does not remove ads; it only makes them less relevant to you.
Whatever an ad network collects stays with that network. I receive no personal information from them, and I have no way of tracing an ad back to the person who saw it.
What your information is used for
To answer you, and to fix the thing you pointed at if you pointed at something broken. Beyond that:
- I do not sell your information, rent it, or share it with anybody.
- There is no mailing list and no newsletter. Writing to me does not add you to anything.
- Your message is never used in advertising or promotion.
- If something you wrote ever seemed worth quoting publicly, I would ask you first, and I would not use it unnamed either.
How long it is kept
Emails stay in my inbox the way ordinary letters stay in a drawer, so that a conversation can be picked up again later. Ask me and I will delete your message along with everything attached to it, and tell you once it is done.
How long Google or Blogger keep their own records is set by their policies, not by mine.
Your rights
You can write to me at any time and ask what information of yours I hold, or ask for it to be deleted. No form to fill in, no reason to give. One email is enough.
If you live in India, the European Union, the United Kingdom or a US state with its own data law, these rights are yours anyway. From my side the way to use them is the same single email.
Children
This site is not built for children, and I do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If a parent believes their child has sent me something, write to me and it will be deleted.
Security, and one honest point
Your message sits in my email account, which is protected by two-step verification, and nobody but me reads it.
The honest part is this: nothing sent over the internet is a hundred per cent secure. No website can truthfully claim otherwise, and I am not going to be the one who does.
So a small piece of advice: never put bank details, passwords, an Aadhaar number or any identity document number in an email to me. I will never need them, and I will never ask for them.
Comments
Where comments are open on a page, they run on Blogger's own system and you sign in with your Google account to leave one. A comment is public, which means anyone who opens that page can read it. Write there what you would be comfortable saying in front of everyone. If you want a comment of yours removed, write to me.
Changes to this policy
The site will change, so this page will change with it. Whenever it does, the date at the top changes too. Anything significant will be stated here plainly rather than buried inside a long paragraph.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about your own information:
Write to
info.monkza@gmail.comA reply usually arrives within three days. If a form suits you better than an empty email window, the contact page has one.