Privacy

What this site collects

There are no accounts, no forms, no comments, no newsletter and no advertising. Fonts are served from this domain rather than fetched from Google, so reading a page here does not tell anyone else that you did.

Since 26 August 2026 there is one exception: a page-view counter, run by Vercel, who also host the site. It records which page was loaded, roughly where in the world the request came from, and whether you arrived from a link somewhere else. It sets no cookie, writes nothing to your browser’s storage, and does not identify you or follow you to any other site.

It also does not phone anyone else: the script and the counter both live on this domain, so your browser makes no request to a third party while you read. You can confirm every sentence in this section by opening your browser’s developer tools — the storage panel is empty and the network panel shows only barelysentient.com.

Why there is no cookie banner

Consent banners exist because a site is storing something on your device that it does not strictly need. This one stores nothing on your device — not a cookie, not a local storage entry, not an identifier — so under the UK rules there is nothing to ask you about.

This page previously said that adding analytics would mean a banner. That was written with Google Analytics in mind, which does need one. The counter described above was chosen specifically so it would not, and so that none of the commitments in the footer would have to be quietly softened to accommodate it. If anything is ever added that does require consent, the banner appears and this page changes with it.

What the host can see

The site is hosted on Vercel. Like any web host, its servers record ordinary request information, including your IP address, the page requested and your browser’s user agent. That is used to serve the page and to keep the service running, and it is retained under Vercel’s own policy rather than mine. I do not query, export or analyse those logs. The page-view counter described above is Vercel’s too; it derives its counts without storing an identifier for you, and I see only totals.

Leaving this site

The shop runs on Fourthwall at shop.barelysentient.com. It is a separate service with its own privacy policy and its own cookies, and anything you buy there is handled by them, not here. Links to the Internet Archive and to other sites are likewise governed by their own policies.

Your rights

UK data protection law gives you the right to ask what personal data an organisation holds about you, and to have it corrected or erased. Since this site holds none — the page-view counts are totals with nobody attached to them — there is normally nothing to return. You are welcome to ask anyway, and requests about the host logs described above will be passed on.

Contact

Email hello@barelysentient.com. This site is published under a pen name; the email is read by the person who writes it.