What I record
To learn which pages are useful and how people find the site, it keeps its own simple visit statistics:
- Pages viewed, how long each stays open, and how far you scroll
- Links and buttons you click, such as downloading the resume
- Where the visit came from: the referring website and any tag in the link
- Your browser, operating system, device type, language, and screen size
- Approximate location (country, region, city, postal code, time zone, and rough coordinates) and the name of your network, which is often an internet provider or employer. Cloudflare works these out from your IP address.
- How quickly pages load and respond (Core Web Vitals), including which part of the page was slowest
If you use “Ask about Steven”, the assistant on the site, your questions and its answers are kept for 90 days with the same daily code described below, so I can see how many people use it and improve its answers. Email addresses, phone numbers and keys are removed first. A job description pasted into “Check a job description” is kept only as its length and first words, and the requirements the site does not cover are kept, without the posting, as questions for me to answer. After 90 days everything is deleted, except the questions I have answered or set aside: of those only the question itself stays.
Requests from search engines, AI crawlers and other bots are logged separately: the bot’s name and user agent, the address it fetched, and the country and network it came from.
What I don’t record
No cookies, no advertising or third-party trackers, and no IP addresses are stored. Visits from the same browser on the same day are grouped by a one-way code made from the IP address, browser, and date. The code changes every day, so visits on different days can’t be linked together.
Your choices
If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, nothing is recorded. Your light or dark theme choice is saved only in your own browser.
Where it’s kept
Visit records are stored in a database at Cloudflare, which hosts this site, and are deleted automatically after 13 months. They are only used to understand how the site is used, and are never sold or shared. Fonts and all other files are served from this site. Cloudflare processes every request to deliver the site; see Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
Questions
Email [email protected].
