Cookies and privacy

salvaged.work sets no cookies of its own and does not track visitors. A small number of third-party services are used to run the site, and some of them may set cookies in your browser. The only personal data the site itself ever receives is what you choose to type into the contact form. This page explains both: what third parties may do, and what happens to anything you send directly to the archive.

Cookies set by this site

None. salvaged.work is a static website. It sets no cookies, uses no local storage, keeps no session, and has no login, comments, shopping basket, or advertising. Nothing you do here is recorded against you as an individual.

Visitor statistics

The archive counts page views using GoatCounter, a privacy-focused analytics service chosen specifically because it does not use cookies.

GoatCounter sets no cookies and stores no persistent identifier for you. It records the page visited, the referring page, the browser and operating system, the screen size, and the country, and stores these as daily aggregate counts rather than as a record of any individual. Your IP address is not stored: it is briefly combined with the user-agent string and a salt that changes daily to produce a hash used only for counting a visit once, then discarded. GoatCounter also honours the Do Not Track browser setting.

Further detail is in the GoatCounter privacy policy and its notes on the GDPR.

Embedded books from the Internet Archive

Some articles embed a book reader served directly by the Internet Archive, so that the scanned original can be read in place.

This embed is an iframe loaded from archive.org. It behaves as though you had visited archive.org yourself: the Internet Archive may set its own cookies and may record the request, and this happens without the archive.org page being under this site’s control. If you have an Internet Archive account and are signed in, that embedded reader can recognise you as a logged-in patron.

The relevant terms are the Internet Archive’s privacy policy and terms of use. Every embedded reader is accompanied by a link to the same item on archive.org, so the embed can be skipped and the book read there instead.

Note that the Internet Archive is based in the United States, so using the embedded reader involves a transfer of the request outside the EU and EEA.

The contact form: spam protection

What happens to the message you type is covered above, under “Privacy policy: the contact form.” Separately, the contact page also loads Google reCAPTCHA to block automated spam. reCAPTCHA is a Google service and does set cookies and collect data about your browser and behaviour in order to judge whether you are a person. It is loaded only on the contact page, never anywhere else on the site. See Google’s privacy policy and terms.

If you would rather not load reCAPTCHA, simply do not open the contact page. No other page on the site loads it.

Content delivery networks

Two script and stylesheet libraries are loaded from public CDNs rather than from this server: cdnjs.cloudflare.com and cdn.jsdelivr.net. Requesting a file from a CDN discloses your IP address and browser to that CDN, which may log it. Neither is used to set cookies for this site.

Hosting

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. GitHub’s servers log requests, including IP addresses, for security and operational purposes. See the GitHub Privacy Statement.

Under the EU ePrivacy Directive, consent is required before storing information on, or reading information from, a visitor’s device, except where that storage is strictly necessary to provide the service the visitor asked for. This site stores nothing on your device, and the analytics it uses were chosen because they store nothing either, so there is nothing to ask consent for on arrival.

The two exceptions are described above and are both deliberate:

  • the Internet Archive book reader, which loads only on those article pages that carry one, and which you can avoid by using the link to archive.org instead;
  • reCAPTCHA, which loads only on the contact page, and only if you choose to open it.

Controlling cookies yourself

Every major browser can block or delete cookies, including blocking third-party cookies entirely, which would prevent the Internet Archive embed and reCAPTCHA from setting anything. This is usually found under Privacy or Site Settings. Blocking third-party cookies does not affect any other part of this site, since the site itself uses none.

Privacy policy

The only place on this site that asks for personal data is the contact page, which asks for an email address and whatever message is typed.

Who is responsible for this data. salvaged.work is an independent, non-commercial archive operated by one person, based in the European Union. The site does not publish the operator’s name. For the purposes of data protection law, the operator of salvaged.work is the data controller for anything submitted through the contact form, and is reachable only through that same contact form.

What is collected. The email address and message content entered into the form. Nothing else is requested. The form does not ask for a name, and none is required to send a message.

How it is used. Solely to read and, where useful, reply to the message: for example about a work to add to the archive, a correction to a transcription or translation, or a question about the site.

How it is sent and stored. The form submits through Formspree, a third-party form-delivery service, which forwards the message by email. Formspree’s own handling of the data in transit is governed by its privacy policy, linked above. Once received, messages are read and then deleted. They are not archived, exported, added to a mailing list, or used for any purpose beyond the original message.

Legal basis. Processing this data relies on legitimate interest (responding to messages sent to a contact form the sender chose to use) rather than a separate consent step, since providing an email address to a contact form is itself the request to be replied to.

International transfer. Formspree is a US-based service. Sending the contact form involves a transfer of the message outside the EU/EEA for the purpose of delivery. See Formspree’s privacy policy for the safeguards it applies to that transfer.

Retention. Messages are deleted after being read. No fixed retention period beyond that, since none is kept.

Your rights. Under the GDPR, anyone whose data is processed here has the right to ask what, if anything, is held about them, to have it corrected, and to have it erased. In practice this is straightforward: since messages are deleted on reading, there is usually nothing left to request after that point. To ask about a message still pending a reply, use the contact form itself. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection supervisory authority in your own country of residence, or in the country the operator is based in, if you believe your data has been mishandled.

Questions

Corrections and questions about this page are welcome through the contact page.

This page describes, in plain terms, the services this site actually uses and what happens to anything sent through the contact form. It is not legal advice.