Privacy policy

The short version: no ads, no tracking cookies, no accounts. Beyond the basic server logs, the security screening every request goes through, and any email you choose to send us, nothing is collected about you.

In force from 1 October 2026. Last updated 14 October 2026. This policy is also available in French.

Who is responsible

Carnet 49 is a one-person independent journal published in Canada by W.F. (a pen name). For any question, request or complaint about personal information, write to contact@carnet49.ca.

The person responsible for personal information is the author (W.F.), reachable at the same address.

What is collected

• No tracking cookies. The site itself sets no cookies. Our security provider, Cloudflare, may set a short-lived security cookie to tell people apart from automated attacks. It is not used to track you or to measure audience.
• No accounts, no forms, no comments, no ads. You can read everything without giving any information.
• Server logs. Like every website, the server records each request: your IP address, the date and time, the page asked for, your browser’s description of itself and the page you came from. These logs are used to run and secure the site and are kept for 14 days.
• Security screening. Every request first passes through Cloudflare, which protects the site against attacks. To do this it processes your IP address and the details of the request. Some automated traffic (from certain cloud networks, or whose browser describes itself the way scrapers do) is first shown a check page. Pressing its button lets your IP address through for 24 hours: the list of addresses let through is held only in the server’s memory for that time, is never written to disk, and no cookie is set. If you have never seen this check page, your address is not on that list. A request from certain proxy and VPN networks, one that arrives from nowhere directly at a record page (a source, claim, data series, project or event), or one that claims to come from one of our pages, from an address whose browser has not displayed any of our pages recently, first gets a short loading page: your browser loads a tiny image on it and moves on by itself after a second. To tell, the server remembers for 6 hours, in its memory only, a scrambled form of each address whose browser displayed a page, which cannot be turned back into the address and is never written to disk.
• No tracking. No measurement or tracking script runs on the pages.
• Your theme and language choices. If you pick light or dark, or switch between English and French, your choice is saved in your own browser’s local storage (not a cookie) and never sent to us. The language choice is used only by the short links in our social media posts, to open the article in your language; when you have made no choice, those links read your browser’s preferred language, in your browser only.
• Emails you send us. If you write to us, we receive your email address, any name you sign with and your message. We use them only to answer you, and to act on a correction or a request you make. We delete them 12 months after the exchange ends, unless a correction you reported is logged, in which case only the correction itself is kept, without your details unless you ask to be credited.

We do not sell, rent or share personal information, and we do not build profiles of readers.

Who can see it, and where it is kept

• Only the author (W.F.) reads server logs and emails. Nobody else works on the journal.
• The site is hosted in Quebec. Server logs are kept on that server, in Quebec.
• Email, in Canada outside Quebec. Our email is handled by Typewire, which stores it, and its backups, in Canada (British Columbia).
• Cloudflare, outside Quebec. Cloudflare, our security provider, handles each request at the data centre nearest to you and may keep security records outside Quebec and outside Canada, including in the United States. See Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
• Our account on X. The site links to our X account but loads nothing from X, so X learns nothing about your visit unless you follow the link. What you do on X, including writing to us there, falls under X’s privacy policy. We use messages sent to us on X only to reply, as with email.
• Security. The site is served only over an encrypted connection (HTTPS) and sits behind Cloudflare’s protection against attacks.

Your choices

You can read the whole site without giving us anything. Server logs cannot be switched off, because a web server needs your IP address to send you the page. To write to us, you can use any email address you like and any name, or none.

Your rights

We follow Quebec’s privacy law, and we give its protections to every reader, wherever you live.

You can ask to see the personal information we hold about you and how it is used, and to have it corrected or deleted. Because the site does not know who you are, we may need a few details to find anything linked to you (for example, the date and time of a visit). We answer within 30 days. Write to contact@carnet49.ca.

Complaints. To complain about how we handle personal information, write to the same address. We acknowledge the complaint, look into it and answer within 30 days.

This journal is not a business: it earns no money and is run by one person. We hold ourselves to Quebec’s privacy law whether or not it formally applies to a journal like this one, because we think it is the right way to treat readers.

Children

The journal is written for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 14. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version appears on this page and the “last updated” date at the top changes.