Privacy Policy
Your privacy is critically important. At the Observatory for Technology (OfTech), a personal blog operated by Warren Fauvel, we operate under a few fundamental principles:
- We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
- We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
- We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
Who We Are and What This Policy Covers
Welcome to OfTech (oftech.blog)—a running record of ideas, arguments, and observations at the intersection of technology intelligence and sustainable industry transformation, run by Warren Fauvel. This Privacy Policy applies to information collected about you when you visit this website or interact with us using our contact forms.
Throughout this document, we refer to our website and related contact channels collectively as our "Services."
Information We Collect
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so—for example, to respond to your inquiries, communicate with you, or understand how visitors interact with the site. We collect this information from two sources: information you provide directly and information collected automatically.
Information You Provide to Us
We collect information that you provide to us directly. Specifically:
- Inquiry and Communications Information: When you send a message through our contact form, we collect the personal details you submit: your name, email address, the content of your message, and your explicit consent choice. We keep a record of these communications to respond to your queries.
Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically when you browse our site:
- Log Information: Like most web servers, we collect standard log data that web browsers typically make available. This includes your browser type, language preference, referring site, referring URL, date and time of access, and operating system.
- Anonymized Site Metrics: We compile aggregate statistics about page hits and visitors. This data is strictly anonymized and cookie-less (see telemetry details below).
Third-Party Infrastructure and Services
We purposefully restrict the third-party processors we interact with to minimize your data footprint. Your interaction data is processed by the following entities:
- Hosting & Infrastructure (Clever Cloud): Our production servers and static deployment instances are hosted using cloud environments provided by Clever Cloud. Data is routed and maintained on secure servers optimized for privacy.
- Analytics Telemetry (Umami Analytics): We utilize Umami for our website metrics. Umami is entirely cookie-less and strips/anonymizes IP data before saving aggregate counters to our database. No persistent tracking identifiers are dropped on your machine, and no behavioral profiling takes place.
- Inquiry Intake (FromBee): When you interact with our contact forms, the transmission data (names, contact details, and input messages) is securely routed via FromBee to process and respond to your direct queries.
How We Use Information
We use the information we collect to:
- Respond to your direct inquiries, requests, and feedback sent via contact forms.
- Monitor and analyze aggregate trends to understand how users interact with our website.
- Ensure the security, stability, and integrity of our website servers.
How We Share Information
We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We only share information in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:
- Service Providers: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need it to provide their services to us (such as Clever Cloud hosting and the FromBee form intake handler). We require these providers to agree to strict privacy safeguards.
- Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
- To Protect Rights and Property: We may disclose information when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Warren Fauvel, third parties, or the public.
Data Subject Rights & Data Erasure Route
We respect global data protection standards. If you are located in the UK, European Union (GDPR), or California (CCPA), you have the right to access, export, limit, or delete the personal data you have shared with us.
To request an export of data you submitted via our forms, or to request complete deletion of your records from our systems, email us at privacy@observatoryfor.tech with the subject line 'Data Subject Request'. We will process and verify your request within applicable statutory timelines.
Our privacy practices are designed to respect global data standards. Portions of this document have been adapted from the open-source frameworks provided by Automattic, utilized under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 4.0 International License.