Privacy Policy

thefact5.com (“FACT”, “we”) is operated as a public content archive. This page explains what we collect and what your rights are. It is intentionally short.

What we collect

Email address — only when you opt in to our newsletter via the signup form on this site. We use it to send you the FACT newsletter. That’s it.

Anonymous traffic stats — page views, referrer, country, device type via Vercel Analytics. No cookies are set, no personal identifiers, no fingerprinting, no advertising trackers. The data is used to see which facts get read.

What we don’t collect

Names, addresses, payment details, social profiles, browsing history outside this site, ad targeting data. We don’t sell, rent, or share any data with third parties for marketing.

Third parties we use

• Buttondown (buttondown.com) — stores newsletter email addresses and sends our newsletter. Their privacy policy.
• Vercel (vercel.com) — hosts the site and runs Vercel Analytics. Their privacy policy.
• Facebook (Meta) — embedded images from Facebook’s CDN. When a page loads, your browser fetches images from Meta’s servers, which may receive your IP and basic browser metadata.
• Google Fonts — typeface files are loaded from Google.
• Google AdSense — once approved, Google serves ads on this site and uses cookies to personalise them and measure performance. See how Google uses cookies in advertising. You can opt out of personalised ads at adssettings.google.com.

Cookies

FACT does not set any first-party tracking cookies. The newsletter form may store your form state briefly in browser memory; nothing is persisted to disk by us. Third-party providers may set their own cookies when their resources are loaded: Google AdSense sets ad-personalisation and frequency-capping cookies; Meta may set cookies via FB-hosted images; Google Fonts does not set cookies. You can block any of these via your browser settings or via Google Ad Settings.

Your rights

You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time using the link in every email — that removes you from our list immediately. To request access to or deletion of any data we hold, email hello@thefact5.com. Under GDPR (EU/UK) and CCPA (California) you have the right to access, correct, port, or delete your personal data — we will honor those requests within 30 days.

Children

FACT is a general-audience publication. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us their email, contact us and we will remove it.

Changes

We may update this policy. The “last updated” date at the top will change. Material changes will be noted in the next newsletter issue.

Contact

Questions? Email hello@thefact5.com.