Short version: we do not place tracking cookies, run ad networks, or share data with third parties for marketing. We do count page views server-side (no cookies, no cross-day identity, no third-party scripts) so we can see what people read. If you click an outbound link to a sponsor or another site, that sites own rules apply from the moment you leave ours.
This page is written to be accurate and verifiable. If anything here stops being true, well update it.
What we dont do
- No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Mixpanel, no equivalent.
- No tracking pixels. No Meta/Facebook pixel, no X/Twitter pixel, no LinkedIn Insight Tag.
- No advertising network. We dont run AdSense, Media.net, Taboola, or any programmatic ads.
- No third-party scripts loaded in your browser. Open the browser developer tools — there are no
<script>tags loading from other domains. - No affiliate links with tracking cookies on our pages. Sponsor links go to the sponsors own site; what they do there is between you and them.
- No data sold or shared with third parties for marketing purposes. Full stop.
- No email newsletter yet. If we add one, it will be opt-in and well update this page.
What we do do
Server-side, privacy-friendly page-view counting
We count GET page views ourselves, on our own server, to see what content people read. The collection is intentionally narrow:
- No cookies are set on your browser to make this work — nothing about it is stored on your device.
- No third-party request is made when you load a page; all aggregation happens on our PHP backend.
- No persistent visitor ID. "Unique visitor" counts are computed from a SHA-256 hash of (your IP + your User-Agent + a server-side salt + todays date). Because the hash inputs include the date, the same visitor on two consecutive days produces two different hashes, so we cannot follow you across days.
- The hash is one-way and salted. We never store your raw IP in the analytics dataset, only the truncated/hashed form. The salt lives outside the webroot.
- Aggregates only. Per day we keep totals: total views, unique-hash count, per-page view count, referrer (parsed to a known source name like "google" or "reddit" — no full URL), device class (mobile/desktop/tablet), browser family, country code.
- Country code comes from Cloudflares
CF-IPCountryheader that Cloudflare already attaches in front of our origin. We do not call any geo-lookup API. - Bots and crawlers are excluded by User-Agent before any data is recorded.
- Admin and API routes are excluded.
If youd rather we didnt count your visits at all, blocking the sites own domain in your browsers tracking-protection list (e.g. uBlock Origin) is sufficient — theres no separate opt-out flow because theres no separate vendor to opt out from.
Sponsors (direct, no tracking)
We accept direct sponsorship placements — a static image plus an outbound link — rendered from our own servers. Sponsor creatives are hosted on this domain; no third-party scripts or pixels are included on the page when an ad is shown. If you click through, youre going to the sponsors site under their own policies.
Donations
If you choose to support us via a link to a third-party donation platform (e.g. Buy Me a Coffee), that platform will handle your payment and apply its own privacy policy. We never see your payment details.
Server access logs
Our web server records standard access logs — IP address, request path, user-agent, timestamp — to defend against abuse and keep the site up. Entries are retained for roughly 30 days, then rotated out. Logs are never shared with third parties. They arent linked to any other information about you.
Cloudflare (sub-processor)
This site is served through Cloudflare for DDoS mitigation and caching. Cloudflare sees your IP address and request metadata as part of delivering the response, and adds the CF-IPCountry header we use for country aggregation. Cloudflares own privacy practices are documented at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy. We cannot opt you out of this without taking the site offline.
Admin session cookie
When someone logs into the admin area, a session cookie is set. This only applies to site administrators — regular readers never receive any cookies from us.
Contact email
If you email us, we keep the email in order to reply. We dont add it to any list.
Outbound links — your clicks, their rules
When you click a link that leaves this site — whether to a news source we cite, a sponsor, a donation page, or anywhere else — you are no longer on our property, and any tracking that happens after that click is governed by that destinations own policy. We dont add tracking parameters to those links for our own use. We disclose sponsored links with rel="sponsored" as required by search engines.
Cookie banner?
We dont show one because we dont set non-essential cookies on your device. The only cookie we issue is the admin session cookie, which is "strictly necessary" under the EU ePrivacy Directive and GDPR, and therefore exempt from consent. The page-view counting described above doesnt use cookies at all, so its also outside the consent rules.
Your GDPR rights
Even with minimal data collection, EU/UK residents have the right to:
- Know what data we hold about them (server log entries from the last ~30 days; daily aggregate counts that include a hashed identifier derived from your IP + UA + day)
- Request a copy of that data
- Request its deletion
- Complain to a supervisory authority
Contact us at the address below to exercise any of these rights. Because we dont tie hashes to a persistent identifier, we may need to ask you to narrow down the date range and approximate IP/User-Agent for a lookup.
Children
We dont knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.
Changes
When anything on this page materially changes — for example, if we add an opt-in newsletter, or if a sponsor arrangement requires disclosure beyond the above — well update this page and change the "Last updated" date at the top. We wont quietly broaden the policy.
Contact
- Email: contact@ttek2.com
- Website: https://ttek2.com
This policy describes the current state of the site. It is not a promise about every future feature — if a future change would broaden data collection, this page will be updated first, not afterwards.