The simplest privacy policy is the one a site earns by not collecting anything in the first place. shortage.life is a public reference; reading it requires no account, no consent dialog, and no surrender of personal data. This page explains the little we do process, and the much we deliberately do not.
01What we collect.
Almost nothing. shortage.life is a public reference site, not an account-based service. When you browse, our privacy-first analytics records an aggregate, anonymised page view — no cross-site identifier, no fingerprint, no profile. We never know who you are, and we make no attempt to find out.
02No tracking cookies.
We set no advertising or tracking cookies. Because we use a privacy-first analytics tool that operates without persistent identifiers, there is nothing to consent to — which is why you will not see a cookie banner. A strictly functional cookie may be used to remember your chosen language and colour theme; it carries no identifier and is never shared.
03Analytics, the privacy-first way.
Our analytics are self-hosted and aggregate-only. We measure which pages are read and from which broad referrer, so we can keep the most-used data fresh. The output is a count, not a dossier. No personal data leaves our infrastructure, and none is sent to a third-party advertising platform.
04The public API.
Requests to the API at api.shortage.life are anonymous and rate-limited by IP address. The IP is used only to enforce the rate limit and to mitigate abuse; it is not stored beyond a short rolling window and is never linked to a person.
05The weekly briefing.
If you subscribe to the Saturday email, we store your address solely to send that email. There is a one-click unsubscribe in every issue, and we do not share the list. The email contains no tracking pixels.
06Your rights.
shortage.life is operated by CryptaGuard BV, registered in Brussels, Belgium, and processes data in line with the GDPR. Because we hold essentially no personal data, most requests are moot — but you may always ask what we hold, and ask us to erase a newsletter subscription, by writing to the address below.
Privacy questions and data requests: privacy@shortage.life — CryptaGuard BV, Brussels, Belgium.