Privacy Policy

This site collects as little as it can while still working.

Questions you submit. If you use the question form, the text of your question and the answer generated for it are stored so the answer can be published on the page and so repeated abuse can be prevented. Do not include personal or confidential information in a question. Answered questions may appear publicly on this page.

IP addresses. Your IP address is combined with a secret key and then hashed with SHA-256; only that hash is stored, solely to limit how many questions one visitor can ask per hour and to limit abuse of the Needle Moves signup form. The raw address is never written to the database, the hash is never shown publicly, and without the secret key it cannot be worked back to your address.

Analytics. Aggregate visit statistics such as page views and visit duration are collected by the hosting platform to understand traffic levels. These are not used to build a profile of you.

Third parties. Questions are processed by Anthropic to generate an answer. Data displayed on the page is retrieved from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the World Gold Council, and the authors of the Geopolitical Risk index. Needle Moves emails are delivered by Resend, our email delivery provider, which processes recipient addresses only to send the messages. Following links to any of those sources takes you to sites with their own privacy practices.

Email. If you write to the address given on this page, your message and address are used to reply and, if you asked to be notified of updates, to contact you.

Needle Moves mailing list. If you subscribe to Needle Moves, the following is stored. Required: your email address. Optional, only if you type them into the signup form: your name, city, state or region, and country — these help make future messages more relevant and are never required. Automatically recorded: a SHA-256 hash of the IP address you signed up from (the raw address is never written to the database), the browser user-agent string, a source label describing which form on the site was used, and any utm_ tracking parameters present in the page URL when you subscribed (used to understand which links bring people to the signup form). Also stored are timestamps for signup, confirmation and unsubscribe, a private confirmation token used once to verify your click, a private unsubscribe token embedded in every message, your subscription status, a broadcast opt-out flag, and — if delivery fails permanently or you mark a message as spam — a short reason code so the address is not mailed again. This information is used to send the notifications you asked for, to prove that consent was given, and to limit abuse of the signup form.

Legal basis for the mailing list is consent, given by clicking the confirmation link in the first message. Nothing is sent before that click. Consent can be withdrawn at any time by using the unsubscribe link included in the visible footer of every message, or by writing to the contact address at the foot of this page.

Retention. Subscription records are kept for as long as you are subscribed, and for a limited period after unsubscribing so that the unsubscribe is honoured and the address is not accidentally re-added. The record can be deleted entirely on request.

Your rights. You may request access to, correction of, deletion of, export of, or objection to processing of any personal data held about you by writing to the contact address at the foot of this page. Requests are handled by hand and there is no automated process.

Where the data is stored. The site's data and the mailing list are stored on servers located in the United States. Subscribers outside the United States, by subscribing, consent to that transfer. Readers in the United Kingdom or the European Union have the right to complain to their local data protection authority.

The mailing list is never sold, rented or shared. The only third party that receives any part of it is Resend, the email delivery provider, which processes recipient addresses and message content solely to deliver the messages.

Cookies and local storage. This site sets a small number of first-party cookies and stores five items in your browser's local storage: a flag recording that you have seen the first-visit disclaimer, the date of your last visit (stored only in your own browser, and used solely so the what-changed strip can show everything that moved since you were last here), a session identifier and an anonymous visitor identifier used by the hosting platform for aggregate analytics, and one platform value. The anonymous identifier persists between visits so repeat visits are not double-counted. None of these are used for advertising or for tracking you across other websites.

Clearing them. You can delete all of these at any time through your browser's settings for this site, or by browsing in a private window. Clearing them will make the first-visit disclaimer appear again and will cause the analytics to treat you as a new visitor. Nothing on this site stops working.

Your privacy choices. To request removal of a question you submitted, to unsubscribe from Needle Moves, to ask what has been stored about you, or to object to analytics collection, write to the contact address given at the foot of this page.