What happens to what you send

What the form collects

Three things you type: your name, your email address and your message. Alongside them the site records the IP address the message came from and the time it was sent, because both are included in the email that reaches me.

Where it goes

The message is sent to me by email over an authenticated connection and is not written to a database — this site does not have one. What you send therefore lives in my mailbox, with my email provider, and nowhere else on this server.

One thing is stored on the server: a counter that records how many messages have recently come from your connection, so the form cannot be used to send floods of mail. It holds a one-way hash of your IP address and a timestamp, nothing else, and entries are discarded after an hour.

Cookies and tracking

There is no analytics, no advertising and no third-party script on this site. Fonts are served from this server rather than from a font provider, so loading a page does not tell anyone else that you visited.

One cookie is set: a PHP session cookie on the front page, which exists so the contact form can tell a real submission from a forged one. It carries no information about you and is discarded when you close the browser.

Who is responsible, and your rights

This site is run by one person, Michał Tekiela, privately and not as a business. Messages sent through the form come to me and to nobody else. There is no other party involved and nothing is passed on.

If you have written to me through this site, you can ask me for a copy of everything I hold that came from you, ask me to correct it, or ask me to delete it. You do not have to give a reason and I will not ask for one. Write from the address you used, or tell me which address it was, so that I can find the message; I will confirm to you when it is done. The one thing that could hold up a deletion is if that particular message is itself part of the dispute this site is about, in which case I will tell you so and tell you why, rather than quietly keeping it.

If you would rather not deal with me about it, you can complain to the data protection authority in the country where you live. You do not have to come to me first.

How long it is kept. Until you ask me to delete it. There is no scheduled clear-out and I would rather say that plainly than name a tidy period I do not actually enforce. Your message sits in my mailbox, and it stays there until you tell me to remove it or until it is no longer of any use for the thing you wrote to me about.

On what legal basis. Legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation, published at OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, p. 1. The interest is an ordinary one: you chose to write to me, and I need to be able to read what you sent, answer it and keep the thread. I am not asking you to consent to anything, because a consent you could not refuse and still send the message would not be worth much. If you think that balance comes out wrong in your case, say so — you can object, and the simplest answer to an objection is that I delete what you sent.

Hosting and logs

This site is hosted by Hostinger, on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.

Like any web host, Hostinger keeps its own server logs. Those record the IP address a request came from, the time, and what was requested. This happens on every visit, whether or not you use the contact form, and it is not something I switch on or off.

How long Hostinger keeps those logs is not something I can tell you, because they do not publish it. Their privacy policy gives retention periods for several other categories of data but none for server logs, saying only that personal data is kept for as long as is necessary to provide the service and to meet legal obligations.